CityLab | David Dudleyhttps://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/2018-01-03T22:53:24-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>Winter is tightening its icy talons on the U.S. east coast this week, with one of the most rapidly intensifying storms on record— memorably described as a “bomb cyclone”—that is bringing snow to Florida, possible blizzard conditions from the coastal Mid-Atlantic up to New England, and misery to humanity in general. “In the storm’s wake,” the <em><a href="In%20the%20storm%25E2%2580%2599s%20wake,%20the%20mother%20lode%20of%20numbing%20cold%20will%20crash%20south">Washington Post</a> </em>warns, “the mother lode of numbing cold will crash south.”</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">A monster storm is headed for the East Coast, but don't worry, it's only expected to become a [squints at notes] "bomb cyclone" <a href="https://t.co/tLjbbRCQiD">https://t.co/tLjbbRCQiD</a></p>
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) <a href="https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/948308728327168001?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 2, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>This is not a prospect to be welcomed. Extreme frigidity is a joyless and lethal kind of weather emergency. It is cruel to the un-housed and elderly, dangerous to first-responders, and hard on civic infrastructure. (On the other hand: <a href="http://nbc4i.com/2018/01/01/cold-weather-means-perfect-conditions-for-ice-fishing/">Ice fishermen are happy</a>.)</p><p>It’s easy to feel paralyzed—nay, frozen!—from action in such challenging circumstances, especially if you live somewhere that’s unfamiliar with unseasonable cold. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up the most basic survival tips to keep you a) warm, b) decently conscientious of your environmental impact, and c) imaginatively stimulated for the next several days.</p><h4>Don’t: Go outside if you can humanly avoid it</h4><p>Remain under the covers for the next 24 hours, if at all possible. This is an excellent time to consume some Cold Snap Culture, such as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/the-blizzard-vladimir-sorokin-review/420804/">contemporary Russian fiction</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee">the poetry of Robert W. Service</a> (“The Bard of the Yukon”), and those viral videos of Canadians throwing boiling water into the air to make snow.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&amp;v=GUlxckvuw4s"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FGUlxckvuw4s%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGUlxckvuw4s&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FGUlxckvuw4s%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=e59abcd3fdf14abe95641518e479f5c0&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><h4>Do: Act like a microclimate</h4><p>Planet-savers: Try to warm yourself before you warm the room or the house. Sweaters, jackets, blankets, tea. (See above.) Science has debunked the famous claim about losing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/dec/17/medicalresearch-humanbehaviour">much of our body heat through the head</a>, but you should still put a freaking hat on.</p><h4>Do: Check your transit agency’s Twitter account for service updates if you have to leave the house</h4><p>Nothing new here, but you should <a href="http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/transit/2017/12/28/long-island-rail-road-issues-cold-weather-fdny-activity">expect</a> <a href="https://www.boston.com/weather/local-news/2018/01/02/extreme-cold-affects-return-to-school-public-transit">delays</a>. Also, check on your kids’ <a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/01/02/cold-causes-school-bus-problem/">school bus situation.</a></p><h4>Don’t: Be a slave to your office’s locked thermostat</h4><p>If you get trapped working late, you’re already swathed à la Michelin, and the office thermostat is locked, try tricking it—<a href="http://lifehacker.com/trick-a-guard-box-protected-thermostat-into-warming-up-1753876434">with ice</a>!</p><h4>Do: heat-tech your pipes</h4><p>Nope, it’s not just for fashionable Uniqlo shoppers. Pipes need warmth layers, too! For homeowners who can hack it, pick up a bundle of polyethylene tubes from Home Depot on the way home and wrap those babies. (Bonus: Cup a few under doorway gaps to keep out chilly drafts.) If you need directions, watch and learn from the insulation masters at the Philadelphia Water Department, below. The Red Cross has <a href="http://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/types-of-emergencies/winter-storm/frozen-pipes">more tips</a> for preventing frozen pipes and their evil companions: burst pipes.</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/83528597" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe></p><h4>Don’t: Dump too many chemicals on the sidewalk</h4><p>Remember, de-icers are supposed to loosen the ice shellacked onto your sidewalk and driveway, not melt a blanket of snow. So go easy. Sprinkle a modest layer on the sidewalk before precipitation starts, to prevent ice from forming and make snow easier to shovel later. NB: some <a href="https://extension.umd.edu/sites/extension.umd.edu/files/_images/programs/hgic/Publications/non_HGIC_FS/FS707%20Melting%20Ice%20Safely.pdf">de-icers are more toxic for pets, lawns, and local water bodies than others</a>. Choose wisely. (Two words: <a href="http://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/why-pickle-brine-on-icy-roads-is-way-smarter-than-salt">pickle brine</a>.) If it’s really cold, skip the salty stuff entirely. It won’t work in temps below zero.</p><h4>Don’t: Forget those who don’t have homes</h4><p>Many city dwellers lack the luxury of futzing with their thermostats in order to stay warm. New York, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston are doubling down on efforts to get people living in homelessness off the streets and into shelters now, but it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort. Here’s <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/how-to-help-the-homeless-other-people-affected-by-the-bomb-cyclone-7774759">Bustle on how to help people you might encounter</a> in the cold.</p><h4>Do: Keep Fido warm</h4><figure><img alt="" height="429" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/01/AP_943581581827/21c1201b3.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Why is this happening? (Mike Groll/AP)</figcaption></figure><p>Most pet parents don’t need reminding, but for those who do: A coat of fur <a href="http://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/pet-winter-safety">does not always cut it</a> in the cold, especially for shorter-hair breeds! Keep pups and kitties indoors, wearing adorable accessories, and away from those potentially toxic de-iced sidewalks unless properly <a href="http://www.akc.org/content/dog-care/articles/dog-boots-for-winter/">shod in dog booties</a>.</p><h4>Don’t: Leave space heaters on and unattended</h4><p>It wastes energy and it’s one of the big reasons why residential fires spike this time of year: Space heaters are involved in <a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/dropping-temperatures-spell-trouble-vulnerable#stream/0">one in five home fire deaths</a>, according to a 2015 report from the National Fire Protection Association. Don’t plug them into power strips or extension cords, either—only directly into three-prong outlets.</p><h4>Do: Construct elaborate fantasy schemes to stay warm</h4><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://giphy.com/embed/3YVz4GIrZ9A1a" width="480"></iframe></p><p>(<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/scary-jake-gyllenhaal-flood-3YVz4GIrZ9A1a">via GIPHY</a>)</p><p>Although cold is no mere state of mind, you can try pretending it is! There’s some science to support this strategy: In <a href="https://www.southampton.ac.uk/psychology/news/2012/12/03_heart_warming_memories.page">one famous study</a>, researchers at the University of Southampton found that evoking feelings of nostalgia helped participants endure extreme cold.</p><p>We put a call out on Twitter for other weird psychological tips for tricking your body. Our favorite piece of wisdom came from one <a href="https://twitter.com/amsavitt">Amanda Savitt</a>, who plows through snow in Fargo, North Dakota (current temp: -4), by imagining she’s an action star in the otherwise terrible 2004 disaster movie <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/">The Day After Tomorrow</a>, </em>which featured climate-disruption survivors evading wolf attacks in the icebound New York Public Library.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Basically I'm Dennis Quaid and I have to save my son Jake Gyllenhaal from the NYPL. Lots of mumbling "I've walked that far in the snow before."</p>
— Amanda Savitt (@amsavitt) <a href="https://twitter.com/amsavitt/status/948557040334589952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Yeah, sounds pretty hot.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedLaura Blisshttp://www.citylab.com/authors/laura-bliss/?utm_source=feedDavid Goldman/APHotlanta, not: Ice builds along a downtown water fountain in Atlanta, Georgia. How To Survive a Bomb Cyclone2018-01-03T17:47:13-05:002018-01-03T22:53:24-05:00tag:citylab.com,2018:209-549584Don’t get frozen in action when the cold snap hits, East Coast.<p>Local news, famously, is dying. Small-market papers are disappearing in droves across the U.S., “news deserts” threaten to absorb vast tracts of the Midwest and Rust Belt, and journalism itself seems to be retreating to a few big-market strongholds.</p><p>However, we appear be entering a golden age of fake local news. Anyone with some Photoshop skills and yen for <em>Onion</em>-esque gag headlines can throw together a satire site for their home region. Many are terrible. But some are like <a href="https://newmainenews.com/"><em>New Maine News</em></a>.</p><p>Seth Macy, a freelance writer from tiny North Haven Island, Maine, is the founder/creator/sole staffer at this surprisingly slick-looking digital publication, which went live on October 18, after Macy ponied up the $99 for a WordPress Premium account and started stocking it with gag stories on such Maine-only obsessions as <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/13/over-80-of-maine-fathers-affection-is-directed-at-their-wood-piles/">woodpiles</a>, <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/11/heroic-man-saves-dying-pit-party-by-cranking-some-acdc/">pit parties</a>, and <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/09/report-dannys-brother-got-him-a-half-gallon-of-allens-for-the-party/">Allen’s Coffee-Flavored Brandy</a> (a cheap liqueur <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/allens-coffee-brandy-liqueur-maine">insanely popular</a> throughout the state).</p><p><em>New Maine News</em> is pretty funny, even to non-locals. Last week, the influential cool-stuff site BoingBoing <a href="https://boingboing.net/2017/11/14/find-out-whats-going-on-in-m.html">posted about it</a>. <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/10/24/mortified-portland-mayor-accidentally-calls-out-new-york-citys-name-in-bed/">Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling</a> appeared to enjoy a joke at his expense. Then the local newspapers and <a href="http://www.wmtw.com/article/new-maine-news-creator-gains-popularity-for-writing-satire/13798081">TV stations</a> got in on the action, and <em>New Maine News</em> is having its media moment, Maine-style.</p><p>The headlines aren’t quite a polished as <em>The Onion</em>’s best stuff, but <em>New Maine News</em> is way better than it has any right to be. It’s also a revealing glimpse into one of America’s more culturally invisible spaces. Outside of Stephen King novels, small-town and rural Maine doesn’t get a lot of attention from the rest of the world. “When you see Maine in a movie or a TV show, it’s like 99 percent off,” says Macy. “That drives us crazy.”</p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Over 80% of Maine Fathers’ Affection Is Directed at Their Wood Piles <a href="https://t.co/tAO8YH0QIE">https://t.co/tAO8YH0QIE</a> <a href="https://t.co/QGGK5VnWiR">pic.twitter.com/QGGK5VnWiR</a></p>
— New Maine News (@newmainenews) <a href="https://twitter.com/newmainenews/status/930050353818734592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Macy lived his whole life in Maine, except for a stint in the Air Force, and <em>New Maine News</em> is steeped in his expertise. His Mainers aren’t slow-talking, Bean-booted caricatures; they boast an endearing specificity, revealed in their lovingly detailed enthusiasms for <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/10/19/maines-republican-gubernatorial-hopefuls-begin-preparing-snowmobiles-for-winter/">snowmobile maintenance</a>, “<a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/10/28/maine-panel-questions-whether-self-driving-cars-will-be-able-to-lay-positraction-rubbermarks/">laying wicked j-strips</a>” in their pickup trucks, and holding parties in gravel pits. (“Every town in Maine has a gravel pit,” Macy explains. “It’s also a great place for a party.”)</p><p><em>NMN</em> often mines <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/10/20/writer-for-maine-magazine-rescued-after-venturing-20-miles-north-east-of-portland/">Maine’s north-south/urban-rural divide</a> for laughs: The Portland metropolitan area and its affluent environs dominates the media landscape, but it’s politically out of the step with more conservative and sparely populated upper half, a situation “pretty ripe for satire,” says Macy, who offers Maine-centric takes on <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/07/this-innovative-chef-took-the-traditional-maine-baked-bean-supper-and-made-it-cost-85/">hipster food trends</a>, <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/08/trump-voters-in-rural-maine-express-regret-about-agreeing-to-be-interviewed-for-this-story/">Trump-Country safaris</a>, and <a href="https://newmainenews.com/2017/11/15/weird-this-guy-rides-a-bike-to-work-even-though-hes-never-had-an-o-u-i/">urban bike enthusiasts</a>.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Weird: This Guy Rides a Bike to Work Even Though He's Never Had an O.U.I. <a href="https://t.co/W1RDKoYq19">https://t.co/W1RDKoYq19</a> <a href="https://t.co/abyQxDrLcD">pic.twitter.com/abyQxDrLcD</a></p>
— New Maine News (@newmainenews) <a href="https://twitter.com/newmainenews/status/930774287081803776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 15, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Beyond the piney woods of Vacationland, the general <em>Onion</em>-ization of local news appears to be thoroughly underway. Most local satire sites appear to adhere to the same basic template. In Richmond, Virginia, it’s the year-old <em><a href="https://thepeedmont.com/">Peedmont</a>. </em>(Recent headline: “Local Winery To Offer <a href="https://thepeedmont.com/2017/10/19/local-winery-to-offer-summer-douchebag-tasting/">Fall Douchebag Tasting</a>.”) Miami has <em><a href="http://theplantain.com/">The Plantain</a></em>, which takes on the challenge of trying to top actual <a href="https://twitter.com/_floridaman">Florida-Man-style news</a>. (“Florida Enacts Law That Prohibits <a href="http://theplantain.com/florida-enacts-law-criminalizing-people-from-twerking-on-moving-cars/">Twerking On Moving Vehicles</a>” turns out to be mostly true.) Somehow, little Erie, Pennsylvania, home to less than 100,000 souls, is able to support two separate gag-news sites, <em><a href="http://themockerie.com/">The Mockerie</a></em> and <em><a href="https://gooferie.com/">Gooferie</a></em>.</p><p>What does this curious proliferation of DIY hyperlocal satire mean? It may just be more evidence that parody is the only sane response to living in credulity-straining times—hence the dominance of indignant comedy-as-truth-telling as practiced by “The Daily Show” and the like. But I think it’s also a sign of the diminution of legit local news platforms and the general concentration of national media into a handful of mega-markets. The cash-strapped newspapers, <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/what-cities-lose-when-an-alt-weekly-dies/537660/?utm_source=feed">dying alt-weeklies</a>, and colorless TV broadcasters that serve smaller regions have few opportunities to do storytelling that depicts regional character.</p><p>These are places starved for content that reflects their lived experiences, and homebrew satire sites are stepping up to provide it. Clicking around <em>New Maine News</em> for 20 minutes will probably offer out-of-staters a better, more nuanced portrait of the Real Maine Zeitgeist than any other media you’re likely to consume. It might be made up—but it definitely rings true.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Macy, who also contributes parody stories to <em><a href="http://thehardtimes.net/">The Hard Times</a>, </em>a punk/gamer site, had very modest expectations for <em>New Maine News</em>. “When I started,” he says, “I figured if I can get 300 people to follow me on Facebook, I’m doing alright.” (He’s now <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/NewMaineNews/community/?ref=page_internal">over 5,000</a>.) Mainers are pessimistic by nature, he says. But now he has visions of expanding his reach—he’d like to do videos, hire another staffer, and keep growing his readership, at least modestly: “I feel like my audience is anyone who lives in a cold place.”</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedRobert F. Bukaty/APMaine. 'New Maine News' Is the Future of Media2017-11-20T12:01:30-05:002017-11-20T12:01:31-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-546338We appear to be entering a golden age of local news satire.<p>In the beginning, the Lincoln Highway was more an idea than a highway. But it was a very powerful idea.</p><p>On its dedication—Halloween, 1913—the towns and cities along the 3,300-mile route erupted in what the <em>San Francisco Chronicle </em>called<em> </em>“spontaneous expressions of gratification”—a wave of municipal celebrations animated by “<a href="https://lincolnhighwaynews.wordpress.com/">the spirit of the great national boulevard.</a>” The governor of Wyoming declared a day of “old-time jollification … and general rejoicing” that included, in a town called Rawlings, the erection of an enormous pyramid of wool. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, residents enjoyed a festive shower of locally made Quaker Oats. </p><figure><a href="https://www.citylab.com/special-report/citylab-on-the-road/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" height="188" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/Lincoln_Highway_Horizontal_Bug/96448969b.png" width="620"></a></figure><p>The Lincoln Highway, which ran from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, gets credit as the first transcontinental road of the automobile age, but it was no highway in the modern sense; when it was dedicated, it was more like a loosely affiliated collection of paved, gravel, stone, and dirt paths, some recently trailblazed through the trackless rural West. Its boosters—a collection of auto industry execs and ex-politicians led by an auto-parts entrepreneur named Carl Fisher—<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2015/11/holiday_travel_who_to_thank_or_curse_for_america_s_highways.html">were gifted promoters</a>, and they successfully sold America on the notion that a sea-to-shining-sea motorway could both unite the nation and sell a lot of cars.</p><p>“The founders took it pretty seriously,” says historian <a href="https://brianbutko.wordpress.com/">Brian Butko</a>, co-director of the reconstituted <a href="https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/">Lincoln Highway Association</a> and author of several books about the road. “Especially in that era, which was only 50 years after the Civil War. They truly looked at the Lincoln Highway as a way to bring the whole country together.”</p><p>During this troubling and divisive summer, we at CityLab have been thinking a lot about what still binds Americans, and whether the country that became fearsomely unrecognizable to many citizens can really be as broken as it often seems. And we figured that there may be no better place to looking for answers than the communities strung along the highway’s route. In August, five CityLab writers stopped at towns and cities whose distinct struggles with issues like economic development, housing affordability, and transportation planning might otherwise go unnoticed by a wider audience. But they shouldn’t. Despite the narratives of geographic, generational, and racial strife that have dominated recent months, we’re convinced that cities remain sites of human problem solving and innovation that have more in common with each other than one might think.</p><p>The privately bankrolled Lincoln Highway may have been partially paved in flim-flammery, but its unifying message was real, and enormous: It helped spur the Federal Highway Act of 1921 and led eventually to the continent-girdling network of interstates that so defined 20th century American life. Today, modern motorists along the former highway’s right of way can still see the distinctive red-white-and-blue signs that spoke to another era’s ideal of national connection. Opening years before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the highway’s route was also marked with a series of statues of the Great Emancipator, which held their own symbolic power. (Indeed, Southern sympathizers conspired to <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/08/the-lost-dream-of-a-superhighway-to-honor-the-confederacy/538338/?utm_source=feed">create a rival highway named for Jefferson Davis</a>, a saga recently unearthed by writer Erin Blakemore in the wake of this summer’s round of Confederate memorial controversies.) “The highways of America are built chiefly of politics,” Carl Fisher wrote in 1912, a statement that only became more true.</p><p>Unlike <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_Motor_Convoy">Lincoln Highway caravaners of yore</a>, CityLab did not set off in a convoy of old-timey vehicles. Andrew Small’s trip to York, Pennsylvania, and Mimi Kirk’s visit to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were both homecomings of sorts—the two writers have roots in the area. Brentin Mock was ideally situated to check out an audacious facelift for a Pittsburgh neighborhood, since he already lives in the city. Kriston Capps and Laura Bliss were dispatched to less-familiar territory—Laramie, Wyoming and Ely, Nevada—to see how the rural West is wrangling with issues of demographics and technology. </p><p>Here’s what we found.</p><p></p><h3><a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/09/the-difference-a-diy-cultural-revival-can-make/538812/?utm_source=feed">York, PA: Building a Cultural Revival From Scratch</a></h3><figure><img alt="" height="252" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/1-1/5cb3757ed.png" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Royal Square in York, PA. (Andrew Small/CityLab)</figcaption></figure><p>In 2009, Alex Dwyer was 19, two years out of high school and stuck in York, Pennsylvania. Like many of her cohort idling in the wake of the Great Recession, she was stuck in her hometown, waiting for <em>anything </em>to happen.</p><p>She’d grown up in the suburbs of this small city in south-central Pennsylvania. After a semester of college in Seattle and then more than a year touring with bands around the country, she’d come back—another <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/08/returning-to-the-rust-belt/538572/?utm_source=feed">Rust Belt returnee</a>, full of ideas. She’s seen flourishing arts scenes in cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh, and she asked herself, “Why can’t that happen in York?”</p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/09/the-difference-a-diy-cultural-revival-can-make/538812/?utm_source=feed"><big><strong>Read more</strong></big></a></p><p></p><h3><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/when-the-road-of-the-future-looks-a-lot-like-the-past/538785/?utm_source=feed">Pittsburgh, PA: The Route to the Future Looks a Lot Like the Past</a></h3><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/IMG_1094/7e491ad17.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood. (Brentin Mock/Citylab)</figcaption></figure><p>In the earliest years of the 20th century, Pittsburgh’s roads were a mess, with no logic to the layout. To sort the streets out, the city recruited Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the nation’s first dean of urban planning, in 1909 to bring some order to the city’s ad hoc patchwork of cobblestone, gravel, brick, and sand-clay roads.</p><p>Olmsted found a lot of promise in the waterfront areas lining Pittsburgh’s Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, despite the fact that these embankments had already been carved up pretty well by railroad tracks.</p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/when-the-road-of-the-future-looks-a-lot-like-the-past/538785/?utm_source=feed"><big><strong>Read more</strong></big></a></p><p></p><h3><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/the-nimby-fight-that-rocked-an-iowa-city/538017/?utm_source=feed">Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The NIMBY Fight that Rocked an Iowa City</a></h3><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/Crestwood_site/dee7f72aa.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">The rezoning sign at the Crestwood Ridge Apartments site. (Mimi Kirk/CityLab) </figcaption></figure><p>Dorothy has lived in northwest Cedar Rapids all her life, moving just one block west 45 years ago to her current house, in whose tidy, bright kitchen I’m sitting. The neighborhood is a comfortable one, heavy on split-level ranches and well-tended lawns peppered with ceramic jockeys, deer, and other ornaments. Though it’s only a few minutes by car to downtown, there’s nary a whiff of the syrupy cereal smell that emanates from the Quaker Oats factory there.</p><p>I’m listening to Dorothy and her neighbor, Lucy,* discuss the nearby affordable housing complex that is set for imminent construction despite their best efforts to block it.</p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/the-nimby-fight-that-rocked-an-iowa-city/538017/?utm_source=feed"><big><strong>Read more</strong></big></a></p><p></p><h3><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/tactical-urbanism-comes-to-outlaw-country/537429/?utm_source=feed">Laramie, WY: Tactical Urbanism Comes to Outlaw Country</a></h3><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/IMG_8783/05dc52195.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Second Street in Downtown Laramie. (Kriston Capps/CityLab)</figcaption></figure><p>From the old Garfield Street Footbridge, trainspotters can idle away the day watching freight trains as they rumble through town. The railroad tracks run directly underneath the pedestrian bridge, a relic built by the Union Pacific Railroad Company in 1929. Around Laramie, hanging around on this bridge waiting for a train to go by is favorite local activity, shared by residents and visitors alike.</p><p>The bridge over the railroad tracks gives a view of Laramie’s past as well as its future: You can see the steeple of the Swedish Lutheran Church that still rises over the old Scandinavian neighborhood on the West Side, as well as the colorful murals that now dot the historic downtown to the east.</p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/09/tactical-urbanism-comes-to-outlaw-country/537429/?utm_source=feed"><big><strong>Read more</strong></big></a></p><p></p><h3><a href="https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2017/09/americas-loneliest-town-is-searching-for-a-match/539070/?utm_source=feed">Ely, NV: America’s Loneliest Town Is Looking For Love</a></h3><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/img_4074_1_1024/31b3da887.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">A rail yard in Ely, NV. (Laura Bliss/CityLab)</figcaption></figure><p>Modernizing the economy of one of the remotest towns in the continental U.S. has its manifest challenges. A mirage of brick and neon amid dimpled mountains and Pixar skies, Ely, Nevada, is four hours from the nearest major airport. Its population has been winding down for decades; one guide to Old West boomtowns describes Ely’s current status as “semi-ghost.” Want to stream Netflix or play Warcraft? Go to Reno: There’s no reliable broadband here.</p><p dir="ltr">The isolation wasn’t always so profound. Founded in 1878 as a stagecoach stop along the Pony Express, Ely boomed in 1908, when copper was discovered in nearby hills. Five years later, the town got an extra shot of economic energy when the route for the Lincoln Highway came through downtown. (On plaques dotting 287 miles of largely unpeopled road, Nevada proudly dubs the Lincoln section of US 50 the “loneliest highway in America.”) Soon it joined with Route 93, bringing workers from across the country and world to the Robinson mine. By the mid-20th century, Ely boasted 6,000 residents and the state’s most productive mine.</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2017/09/americas-loneliest-town-is-searching-for-a-match/539070/?utm_source=feed"><big><strong>Read more</strong></big></a></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedWikipedia/Royal Square/Madison McVeigh/CityLabCityLab on the Road2017-09-07T09:55:00-04:002017-10-26T12:16:38-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-539031We’re hopping on the historic Lincoln Highway, America’s first coast-to-coast thoroughfare.<p>The death of the print edition of the <em>Village Voice</em>, which was announced on Tuesday, is being widely eulogized as the <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/end-an-era-village-voice-will-no-longer-be-print-1031578">end of an era</a>. Which era? Depends on which <em>Voice </em>you called your own—the granddaddy alternative weekly that was founded in 1955 survived a parade of owners and editors over its six decades. It outlived many of its children, the network of other free urban papers that adhered to the model the <em>Voice</em> created. But it couldn’t survive the implacable, unstoppable decay of the print advertising that once sustained alt-weeklies nationwide.</p><p>In recent years, those forces have claimed the <em>Boston Phoenix</em>, the <em>San Francisco Bay Guardian</em>, the <em>Philadelphia City Paper</em>, and many other once-mighty brands, a media mass extinction <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/10/the-alt-weekly-death-spiral-strikes-philadelphia/408502/?utm_source=feed">often dubbed the alt-weekly death spiral</a>. Shuttering the <em>Voice</em> in print isn’t so much the end of an era as it is an exclamation point on this phenomenon, and an opportunity to formally mourn what the alternative media once provided—the voices it nurtured, the storytelling techniques it pioneered, the sense of community it helped create.</p><p>But the good times for alt-weeklies have been over for a long time, and most of those who paused to praise the paper on social media admitted as much. “The <em>Voice</em> I'll miss hasn't really existed for a while now,” a journalist friend told me over email, “and even if it did, I would be reading it online anyway.”</p><p>Many of those tributes also point to the <em>Voice</em>’s <a href="https://www.poynter.org/2017/the-village-voice-is-closing-its-print-edition4/471184/">tradition of fearless no-guff progressive muckrakery</a>, which most alternative weeklies shared, and whose loss is now acutely felt. The hard-boiled truth-to-power takedown of malfeasance was a key ingredient of the alt-weekly recipe, and many <a href="http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/10/30/phoenix-globe-spotlight/">alts were out first on big stories</a> that dailies later received credit for.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The Village Voice was exposing Donald Trump when no one else was paying attention. <a href="https://t.co/UvmzMpGheS">pic.twitter.com/UvmzMpGheS</a></p>
— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) <a href="https://twitter.com/NicholsUprising/status/900045817372962816">August 22, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Others fear the deepening of America’s “news deserts” in the wake of the Great Alt-Weekly Die Off, especially in smaller markets, where two rival daily newspapers became one, or none, leaving behind a rag-tag fugitive fleet of online outlets, often self-funded or nonprofit in nature, scrambling for purchase in a hostile business environment. That’s what’s happening in my home market of Baltimore, where my former employer, the 40-year-old <em>City Paper</em>, awaits its date with the reaper. The paper is now owned by the same conglomerate that owns the <em>Baltimore Sun</em>, a curious and unfortunate situation to be in, as the company has promised to close it by the end of the year. In the meantime, <a href="https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/baltimore-city-paper-alts-close.php">a couple of <em>City Paper</em> staffers</a> are <a href="https://www.poynter.org/2017/last-month-baltimore-city-paper-said-it-was-closing-now-a-nonprofit-is-working-to-restore-the-citys-alternative-media/470245/">ramping up a nonprofit “guerilla newsroom”</a> to help fill the gap.</p><p>They’ll need all the help they can get. The shortage of smart, professional digital newsgathering in smaller American cities is a real problem with no immediate solution on the horizon; sadly, the number of eyeballs likely to land before a local story online isn’t enough to generate the income that would justify making it. In the longer term we probably can’t crowdfund our way out of that. But old-timers might recall that, even in their glorious futon-store-advertisement-glutted heyday, alt-weeklies were never all that big on actual news. In a pre-internet era, the weekly publishing schedule meant that most alt-weekly writers were free to roam about gathering string for eccentric features of their own devising, untethered to news cycles or any other outside logic. News was something of an accidental byproduct of this process.</p><p>The thing the <em>Voice</em> and its descendants gave readers was something more important than the occasional scoop: They served as critical conveyors of regional lore and scuttlebutt and intel. Dailies may have told you what was going on; alt-weeklies helped make people <em>locals</em>, a cranky cohort united by common enthusiasms and grievances. The alternative media was the informal archive of the city’s id, a catalog of fandom and contempt that limned the contours of the populace. And this part of their role, as it turns out, is a lot harder to replace in the digital era.</p><p>Like so many of the fortysomething-and-up journalists lining up to drop flowers on the grave of the <em>Voice</em> now, I’m a product of the alt-weekly farm-team system, so I’m partial to the model. But before I worked at Baltimore’s <em>City Paper</em>, I was a reader, a newcomer in a truly strange city, and the publication was the smart-ass and sometimes scary Baltimore-born pal I craved and needed.</p><p>This was always baked into the alternative media vision: The <em>Voice</em> started out as a humble neighborhood newsletter (albeit one with a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/05/it-took-a-village">lot of literary heavyweights behind it</a>), full of gripes and insights about stuff happening next door, and the best of its descendants shared a sense of hyperlocal mission—the idea that a publication with a very low bar of entry could transform a diverse mob of strangers into neighbors and citizens.</p><p>Alt-weeklies didn’t just provide pages of cultural event listings; they handed you a kit of tools for unlocking the city’s treasures and weird underground delights, then grabbed your hand and made you check it out. They showed you filthy drawings, amazing bands, local oddballs, and everything else that a straight newspaper wouldn’t, or couldn’t. And they did it for free, asking only for your forbearance as you waded through the 1-900 sex-line ads and adult services listings that paid for the forests of newsprint.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>As many critics noted, the alt-weekly biz was kept aloft by some seriously skeevy advertising revenue, and the overall progressive vibe of the papers did not entirely disguise the fact that, even in majority-black cities like Baltimore, their content often appeared to be written entirely by and for young white goobers such as I. Guilty on both counts. But less has been said about how the free papers reached readers now widely ignored by online platforms: Going through the weekly mailbag circa 1992—this was actual physical mail, kids—I saw the kind of generational and socio-economic diversity that few media platforms now command. We got heaps of letters from older readers in all parts of town, who often wrote faithfully just to express their displeasure. But they kept reading, and the paper really did function as a kind of urban commons, a place where all residents felt they had earned an equal say, simply be dint of living here. The migration to digital and the rise of social media atomized this audience, and the online startups that have emerged since have not been able to reassemble it.</p><p>The <em>Voice</em> brand will live on, for now, though its connection to its host community and its future role as a digital outlet serving a borderless audience is hazy. But it’s not entirely hopeless: Outlets like Seattle’s <em><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/">Stranger</a></em>, the <em><a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/">Chicago Reader</a></em>, and Raleigh-Durham’s <em><a href="https://www.indyweek.com/">IndyWeek</a></em>, to name just a few plucky survivors, are still in the game, telling important stories and adapting to the post-futon-store revenue era. Many other cities are finding ways to keep the buccaneering spirit, if not the physical medium, of their vanished local weeklies alive, often <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/is-there-hope-for-local-news/382516/">via NPR-style nonprofit models</a> and various jerry-rigged funding streams.</p><p>And, more broadly, the alt-weekly itself may never die: It passed its genes on to internet, which absorbed the tone and M.O. of the format as it devoured its business model. But for journalists and fans of cities alike, all these empty boxes on so many street corners stand as a stark warning: Think about all the voices that you just stopped hearing, and ask yourself where they all went.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedMark Lennihan/APThe free Village Voice newspaper announced on Tuesday it would cease publishing in print. What Cities Lose When an Alt-Weekly Dies2017-08-23T12:17:51-04:002017-08-23T17:01:58-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-537660As the<em> Village Voice</em> stops its print edition, the alternative-weekly era officially ends.<p>Early this morning, a small crowd of joggers stood at the polished granite base of a statue that wasn’t there, a monument to the women of the Confederacy.</p><p>It had been in the middle of a small park across from Johns Hopkins University since 1916. Last night a crew of contractors dispatched by the city pulled it up and trucked it away, along with two other Jim Crow-era memorials and a statue of Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born Chief Justice who authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision. The elaborate operation went off without a hitch overnight. Most Baltimoreans woke up to the news that a long-simmering controversy over the racially inflammatory artifacts was simply over.</p><p>The joggers were greeted by a <em>Baltimore</em> <em>Sun</em> reporter, who’d been dispatched before dawn. The mood was cautiously jubilant. They snapped photos of each other. “It’s a small victory,” one said. “But let freedom ring.” </p><p>Maryland may have been a Union state, but the Civil War allegiances of Baltimore citizens teetered between North and South. The city has <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-baltimore-confederate-monuments-list-20170814-htmlstory.html">multiple Confederate monuments</a>, thanks to the efforts of monied 19th and 20th century leaders with Southern sympathies. (Here’s a <a href="https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1trblOxyMnu71b9bFsCQ_9Rs2hZ_NqNAwmDO5aIefJlM&amp;font=Default&amp;lang=en&amp;initial_zoom=2&amp;height=650">terrifically detailed timeline</a>, from local preservationist Eli Pousson, that assembles the complete saga of how they got here.) After years of <a href="https://march.rutgers.edu/2016/11/the-uncertain-fate-of-baltimores-confederate-monuments/">debate and deliberation among city leaders, preservationists, historians, and activists </a>about what to do with the city’s trove of CSA-themed statuary, the move by Mayor Catherine Pugh to remove all four of them at once overnight offered a sudden and unambiguous resolution.</p><p>The operation began just before midnight and was over before the sun came up. The mayor and several journalists looked on as a team of workers, surrounded by police, used a crane to wrest the largest of the monuments—twin equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that have stood in Wyman Park, steps from the Baltimore Museum of Art, since 1948—from their base at about 3 a.m.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Baltimore mayor Cathy Pugh steps out of SUV to watch as crane prepares to lift Confederate monument in dead of night. <a href="https://t.co/AN6vQRrFRt">pic.twitter.com/AN6vQRrFRt</a></p>
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) <a href="https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/897711521593253888">August 16, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>The Lee-Jackson memorial had been squarely in the crosshairs of local activists for many years. Back in September, a commission recommended <u>moving two of the four controversial monuments</u>, and Mayor Pugh <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-pugh-monuments-20170814-story.html">pledged on Monday to remove all CSA</a>-themed monuments. After <a href="https://baltimorebrew.com/2017/08/15/council-resolves-to-deconstruct-confederate-monuments/">a debate that night</a>, the City Council upped the ante, passing a resolution in favor of total CSA statue “deconstruction.”</p><p>After a crowd in Durham, North Carolina, <a href="https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/08/durham-protesters-topple-confederate-statue/536883/?utm_source=feed">successfully toppled a statue on Monday</a>, the<a href="https://twitter.com/BmoreBloc/status/897533641722667009"> activist collective Baltimore Bloc announced on Twitter</a> yesterday that they planned on marshaling a crowd to take matters into their own hands at 6 p.m. Wednesday evening. But the city beat them to the punch. By morning, the two generals and their horses were gone, and a knot of TV news teams surrounded the graffiti-decorated base. Nearby, an anti-racist statue called Mother Light raised a defiant fist at the vacant plinth. </p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/IMG_8095/fecbab51f.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">The Lee-Jackson Memorial in Baltimore, minus Lee and Jackson. (David Dudley/CityLab)</figcaption></figure><p>It’s not yet clear how Baltimore’s skillfully executed night raid on the Lost Cause fits into the larger and still-unfolding national crisis triggered by the Charlottesville violence and President Trump’s unsettling embrace of white nationalism. For many, the only question here is: What took so long? This is a majority-African-American city in a nominally Union state. Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, recently released a statement <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/hogan-calls-for-removing-the-statue-of-roger-b-taney-calling-it-the-right-thing-to-do/2017/08/15/3a84dec0-81eb-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html?utm_term=.e8e8c02de227">supporting the removal of a statue of Justice Taney statue from the State House grounds in Annapolis</a>. Politically, Pugh’s preemptive strike was a no-brainer. The fate of memorials in cities and towns in Southern states is likely to be resolved more contentiously.</p><p>But, locally, this is a big deal, and not only because it offered violence-weary Baltimoreans a rare opportunity to wake up to some good news.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>The <em>way</em> the removal was executed—swiftly, peacefully, authoritatively, and with all the necessary permits—served as a desperately needed demonstration that the civic compact was not hopelessly broken. As the Baltimore <em>City Paper</em>’s Brandon Soderberg <a href="http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-baltimore-s-confederate-and-white-supremacist-monuments-removed-by-city-overnight-20170816-htmlstory.html">reported this morning</a>, congenial police officers didn’t interfere with onlookers. The Mayor, the City Council, and most of the citizens were, for once, on the same page. A plan was made, professionals did their jobs, and no one got hurt. For a city that has so often served as a symbol of urban dysfunction, this was an effective display of municipal competence, proof that we are, despite everything, a governable community.</p><p>Baltimore defied its troubled history here in another way, too. Statue-removal is rare in a city more famous for building them. The town’s 1830s nickname, “The Monumental City,” springs from the <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-monument-city-20150815-story.html">local enthusiasm for memorial-making</a>. The smoke of battle around Fort McHenry had barely cleared before Baltimoreans started raising money to build <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Monument">a privately funded War of 1812 battle monument</a>. In 1815, Baltimore began constructing its 178-foot-high Washington Monument, the nation’s first major tribute to honor George Washington. More recently, the city has erected statues of <a href="http://monumentcity.net/2009/02/20/thurgood-marshall-statue-baltimore-md/">Justice Thurgood Marshall</a>, wacky <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bal-schaefer-1030-story.html">former mayor William Donald Schaefer</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe%27s_Dream">Babe Ruth</a>, and <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/frank-zappa-bust">native son Frank Zappa</a>. Making monuments is something Baltimore does really well. And today, we have four new places to put them.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedDavid Dudley/CityLabThe site of the Confederate Women's Monument in North Baltimore. The statue, and three others, were removed overnight. How Baltimore Removed Its Confederate Monuments Overnight2017-08-16T12:47:15-04:002017-08-16T13:23:55-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-537099For a city dogged by violence and unrest, this was a big deal.<p>If you wanted a car that could hurt people, you can do a lot worse than a Dodge Challenger. Blunt of prow, two tons, often wildly overpowered, it’s a model that has a well-deserved <a href="http://www.thedrive.com/news/13430/100-mph-dodge-hellcat-police-chase-ends-in-fiery-crash-outside-auto-museum">reputation for vehicular mayhem</a> even when operated by drivers who weren’t actively trying to kill and injure others.</p><p>So when the first images emerged of the vehicle that plowed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters in downtown Charlottesville on Saturday, I thought, <em>Yep, that makes sense</em>. The photos are remarkable: the silver-grey muscle car bearing down on a knot of people, then a terrifying shot of bodies flying over the vehicle. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/aug/13/fatality-car-attack-anti-fascist-white-supremacist-rally-charlottesville-video-report">In videos of the incident</a>, you see the car collide with the rear of a Toyota, then reverse away across the city’s brick-paved pedestrian mall, with front-end damage that seems to accentuate the car’s natural scowl.</p><p>The Challenger is among the most retrograde of machines, a scrupulously literal homage to the brand’s 1970 model, except bulked up. You can drive one off the dealer lot with more than 800 horsepower, an absurd figure for a civilian-operated vehicle.</p><p>That wasn’t exactly the car in Charlottesville—James A. Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, was driving a 2010 model with a base V6. His hood scoops and stripes were just for show: The car makes a mere 250 horsepower and, as Edmunds noted in a road test, <a href="https://www.edmunds.com/dodge/challenger/2010/road-test-specs/">can be outraced by a Honda minivan</a>. Still, that was sufficiently lethal. A 32-year old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed in the attack, which may <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/politics/charlottesville-sessions-justice-department.html">be classified as a hate crime</a>. Many others have serious injuries; Fields has been charged with second-degree murder, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/judge-denies-bail-for-man-accused-of-ramming-car-into-charlottesville-protesters/2017/08/14/2177a028-80fd-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html?utm_term=.48f21e87a627">among other counts of malice</a>.</p><p>The use of vehicles as weapons of political terror is <a href="http://cjlab.memri.org/latest-reports/aqap-inspire-magazines-open-source-jihad-section-use-a-pickup-truck-to-mow-down-the-enemies-of-allah-a-random-lunch-hour-shooting-at-a-crowded-washington-dc-restaurant-mi/">cribbed right from the Al-Qaida playbook</a>, and it’s a tactic that has become familiar in recent European attacks by jihadists driving big, anonymous commercial vans. But there’s a kind of awful logic in seeing a huge American muscle car as the killing machine of choice for the Nazis and white supremacists that besieged Charlottesville. The Dodge Challenger—even more so than its two rivals, the Ford Mustang and Chevy Camaro—is a kind of mechanical embodiment of Making America Great Again, a dinosaur car utterly shameless in its evocation of a never-was national past. “It’s a rolling relic of a time that’s slowly vanishing before our eyes,” as <em>Jalopnik’s </em>William Clavey recently concluded <a href="http://jalopnik.com/the-2017-dodge-challenger-t-a-392-is-a-middle-finger-to-1796776614">in a terrific review of a 2017 model</a>. In a passage that effectively captures the essential screw-you qualities embedded into this particular model, Clavey effectively describes how the machine’s personality manifested in his driving style:</p><blockquote>
<p>Suddenly, I had become the douchebag. I was revving the shit out of its engine the moment I’d encounter a Prius or a Leaf, blipping the throttle when approaching intersections just to spawn a reaction. People despised me. Planet Earth wanted me gone. And I didn’t give one flying fuck.</p>
</blockquote><p>To be clear, <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/fred-perry-wants-alt-right-bros-to-stop-wearing-their-polos">brands don’t always bear responsibility</a> for the ideologies that adopt their products. (Though Dodge might want to ease off on <a href="https://twitter.com/Dodge/status/870792441401679874">playing up the car’s fast-and-furious</a> image.) And physics is physics: A Honda minivan driven in anger would likely have exacted the same toll. Fate has cast the Dodge Challenger in a very minor villain role in a much larger national tragedy; those who drive these cars, or just dig them, are not enemies of democracy and decency.</p><p>But it must be said that this is a car that is practically engineered to make you drive like an asshole. You can barely see out of the thing—front and rear visibility is seriously hampered by the small gun-slit windows. Even the base model with the V6 manages to get circa-1970 gas mileage. Its styling is both a slavish reproduction of the infinitely cooler Nixon-era model (made <a href="http://moparconnectionmagazine.com/what-you-may-not-know-about-the-vanishing-point-1970-dodge-challenger-rt/">famous in the 1971 film <em>Vanishing Point</em></a>) and a bloated parody of it. Like many modern retro-muscle cars, it’s an archetypal midlife-crisis toy marketed heavily at male Boomers who recall the glory days of Detroit iron. The kids who are doing burn-outs in the parking lot or sliding into trees with Challengers now probably picked them up after those first owners have moved on: 20-year-old James Fields <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/08/12/car-hit-charlottesville-crowd-purchased-florence-registered-ohio-online-records-show/562283001/">got his hands on his in June 2015</a>, when it was a five-year-old used car.</p><p>In the toxic stew of racial resentments and masculine anxieties we saw in the young white mobs of Charlottesville, the weaponized nostalgia that helped fuel the killer’s car is a small ingredient—but an ingredient nonetheless. The oft-chanted alt-right terror of <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/dahlia_lithwick_on_the_nazis_in_charlottesville.html">“being replaced”</a> comes from a similar place: an awareness that the currents of history are not in their favor. This kind of car may be a “Middle Finger to the Future of Cars,” as <em>Jalopnik</em> said <a href="http://jalopnik.com/the-2017-dodge-challenger-t-a-392-is-a-middle-finger-to-1796776614">in their review headline</a>, but that future is coming anyway.</p><p>Urbanists and drivers alike often invoke the notion of a metaphorical <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113167486376794406">“war on cars”</a> that is currently being waged. Depending on your perspective, this is either a long-overdue effort to reclaim car-centric spaces for people, or a sustained nanny-state assault on the freedoms that the private automobile granted. Central to that debate is the idea that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/">costs of these machines</a> to society are increasingly unacceptable, and that the days of their reign must end.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Those who push for the adoption of self-driving technology often cite the numbers of those killed on American roads—more than 40,000 last year, a sharp escalation—and the promise that technology would save the vast majority of those lives. Autonomy would also save the lives of those who might be intentionally targeted by drivers intent on using cars as weapons.</p><p>A muscle car—piloted by an actual Nazi—intentionally ramming people on a pedestrian mall is perhaps the least subtle imaginable way to see the war-on-cars metaphor come to cartoonish life. It’s also a powerful reminder that even cars that aren’t being driven to kill are potentially lethal; for most of us, driving is the most dangerous thing we do every day. There’s a lot of evidence that we’re getting too dumb and <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/10/rise-in-traffic-deaths/503294/?utm_source=feed">too distracted</a> to be allowed to do it much longer. To this debate now comes a fresh argument: Some of us are also too evil.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedReuters Killing Machine2017-08-14T12:38:05-04:002017-08-14T17:27:08-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-536787There’s an awful logic to the American muscle car that served as a weapon of hate in Charlottesville.<p>The big thing I remember about rat fishing is how, after you got over the weirdness of the enterprise, it felt a lot like regular fishing.</p><p>The story went like this: For three years in the early 1990s, an East Baltimore bar called the Yellow Rose Saloon, now defunct, sponsored a “rat fishing tournament,” with participants using light fishing tackle to catch live rats in the alley behind the bar. The lines were baited with bacon and peanut butter; the rats, once hooked, were set upon by men with baseball bats and beaten to death. After a weekend of this, whoever reeled in the heaviest rodent was declared the winner. I forget what the prize was.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">ANIMALS WEEK</h4>
<figure><a href="https://www.citylab.com/special-report/animals-week/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/animal_bug-03.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="https://www.citylab.com/special-report/animals-week/?utm_source=feed">Urban citizens of all species. </a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="https://www.citylab.com/special-report/animals-week/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>The organizers of this event were sort-of trying to draw attention to decaying conditions in their neighborhood, and it sort-of worked; animal rights protesters and news crews swiftly descended, and the contest went 90’s-style viral. By 1995 the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/01/us/ratmen-of-baltimore-go-rat-fishing-again.html">was obliged to weigh in</a>. There’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yv9I33uob0">a YouTube video</a>, of course. Chuck Ochlech, the lead instigator of the thing, <a href="http://www.chrislanders.net/rats/">told a reporter</a> that the mayor called him and begged him to call off the contest, which was the sort of brutal and squalid spectacle that Baltimore was trying to unburden itself of in the 1990s.</p><p>I covered the tourney in ’94, which was the last year they used actual hooks. (Bowing to demands from authorities, the fisherpeople thenceforth flung baited glue traps, which seemed less effective.) As part of my reporting, I took a turn with a rod and tried my luck. The whole thing was pretty medieval and objectionable, but, it must be said, not without its sporting elements. The trick, I was told, was to set the hook in the rat’s teeth, since otherwise it would just rip out. Rats are a lot wilier than fish, however, and it took patience to wait for one to grab the glob of bacon. I failed to land the big one. But when I did manage to briefly get one on the line, the effect was weirdly thrilling, in the same way that a largemouth bass strike is—you feel this direct, kinetic connection between you and a desperate, fleeing creature; the predator drive is awakened, and for an electric moment, human-world and rat-world are one.</p><p>Rats may be among the most familiar and least beloved of the wildlife that thrive in urban spaces, but they are hardly alone in their rekindled willingness to claim cities as their own. As sport hunting has declined and rural areas have emptied out, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/20/urban-beasts-how-wild-animals-have-moved-into-cities">cities worldwide are seeing a resurgence</a> of charismatic predators like <a href="https://www.citylab.com/environment/2012/10/youve-heard-urban-coyotes-urban-bears-could-be-next/3561/?utm_source=feed">bears</a>, <a href="https://phys.org/news/2017-05-populations-bobcats-urban-pest.html">bobcats</a> and <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141121-coyotes-animals-science-chicago-cities-urban-nation/">coyotes</a>, the latter of which occasionally emerge from the shadows to <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141121-coyotes-animals-science-chicago-cities-urban-nation/">thrill New Yorkers</a> and are now common in the greater Chicago area (where some lawmakers <a href="http://wgntv.com/2016/04/14/alderman-says-leave-urban-coyotes-alone-let-them-take-care-of-the-rats/">have encouraged their return, noting that they keep the rats in check</a>). Other urban animals are of the domestic nature: They arrive invited, <a href="https://www.thrillist.com/news/new-york/nyc-subway-dogs-in-bags-instagram-twitter">ride public transit</a> in little bags, and <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/how-to-design-the-best-dog-park/522870/?utm_source=feed">demand their own infrastructure</a>.</p><p>This week, CityLab will be rounding up stories about all kinds of city-dwellers, from pigeons and crows and bugs to dogs, deer, and horses. Urban interactions with creatures great and small can be sources of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXUG8q4jKU">wonder</a> and <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2304612/bizarre-moment-massive-red-tailed-hawk-kills-a-pigeon-in-downtown-new-york-and-eats-it-sat-on-top-of-a-car/">horror</a>, but they are also important reminders that the human-engineered environments we have temporarily imposed upon the planet are not ours exclusively: The urban ecosystem is just that, an ecosystem. There’s a transgressive thrill in certain encounters with urban wildlife, simply because we’re convinced that they’re not supposed to be here. But life, famously, finds a way. When we marvel or gripe about a species “invading” the city, whether it’s the mountain lions that haunt Los Angeles or the <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wild-boar-sack-rubbish-strewn-rome-x3hqnbv5z">wild boars besieging</a> Rome, we sometimes forget who the true invaders are.</p><p>Coming home after dark, I’ll often come face-to-face with one of my neighborhood’s many foxes, another species that has adapted to city life with startling success <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/urban-foxes-number-one-for-every-300-residents-study-suggests">(one U.K. city has an estimated 23 foxes per square kilometer)</a>. The fox tends to use the sidewalk on his evening rounds, and he doesn’t seem particularly furtive about it anymore. When we meet, we might freeze for a moment and exchange startled looks, each of us wondering the same thing before we go about our mutual business: <em>What are you doing here?</em></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedPhotograph by Joseph Kohl. Courtesy Maryland Historical SocietyA rat fisherman waits for a bite in East Baltimore in 1994. When City Life Is Wild2017-08-07T12:18:00-04:002017-08-08T10:11:46-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-536097This week, we’re fishing up stories about urban animals of all species.<p>One weekend a year, a big group of my neighbors rents out a bloc of campsites in a state park a few hours away and goes camping together. This started as a getaway for a child’s birthday party, but now it feels more like a corporate retreat—an annual opportunity for the member households to gather, scheme, and strengthen our neighborhood brand. Indeed, once our tents are erected and camps established, the resulting compound is basically just another version of our neighborhood, reconstituted in the distant woods. The same kids play in the road; the same parents busy themselves with homeowner-esque chores and, as soon as it’s feasible, stop to drink beer and make small talk until the sun goes down. When we return to our regular homes on Sunday, our community bonds are renewed.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">NEIGHBORS WEEK</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/neighbors-week/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/neighbors_week-image-brendan_mcdermid-reuters"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/neighbors-week/?utm_source=feed">We’re all in this together. </a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/neighbors-week/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>Plenty of neighborhoods have similar rituals, but mine seems to go at it pretty hardcore. There’s the Memorial Day Picnic, the Pumpkin Carving Festival, the Holiday Gift Exchange, and a whole raft of lesser—but still mandatory—events throughout the year. Soon after we purchased our house a decade ago, it became very clear that we’d signed on for social and civic obligations well beyond the norm. The neighboring would not be limited to banana-bread exchanges and picking up each other’s mail. Together, we’ve welcomed babies and buried parents and partners and pets. On summer evenings, a roving happy hour usually materializes, so we can gripe, epically, about work, family, and life. The block is a clannish confederation, one whose rhythms and rituals echo the gangs of high school. We are, we understand, stuck with each other for a while. We have custom t-shirts.</p><figure><img alt="" height="413" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/06/940-1/8b778c003.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">I was serious about the t-shirt thing. (Johanna Dudley)</figcaption></figure><p>Neighborhoods are bound by mysterious forces, real and virtual. The latter can be problematic. While I love my neighbors, I still tend to avoid the local listserv, where the advantages of picking up an occasional free hedge trimmer or bit of gossip are often outweighed by the exposure to thunderously petty complaints of various kinds. One can have Too Much Neighbor, and I’ve found that face-to-face interactions are usually sufficient. But in this I may be outnumbered: The social media platform <a href="https://nextdoor.com/about_us/">Nextdoor</a>—which aims to be the Facebook of the planet’s block-level networks—now claims to be in 140,000 individual neighborhoods, about 75 percent of the U.S., and it’s recently <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-internet-local-nextdoor-idUSKBN19B0D0">expanded into the U.K, the Netherlands, and Germany</a>; it’s “the new way to neighbor,” as their tagline goes.</p><p>Nextdoor’s masterminds claim that their model can <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/02/for-nextdoor-eliminating-racism-is-no-quick-fix/">tame the more toxic tendencies of social media</a>: Because users need to use their real names, identities, and addresses (checked by the company’s “neighborhood verification team”), the community is inherently less trollish, they say. “There’s a certain decency that comes with proximity,” says Steve Wymer, the firm’s VP of Policy. Wymer is a committed evangelizer for Nextdoor’s ability to unlock the latent goodness of humanity. He lives in San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, where the app’s penetration is highest—432 individual neighborhoods have claimed accounts, as have the mayor, the city council, and most city services. Wymer sees Nextdoor as performing a vital future role as a conduit that connects citizens to local government, and to each other, like never before. “You’re seeing the kind of civic engagement that the founders would have envisioned,” he says.</p><p>I checked in with Shireen Santosham, San Jose’s chief innovation officer, to see if the city shared the company’s enthusiasm. It did, to a measured degree. But in a diverse city with some extreme wealth disparities, relying on a private network like Nextdoor risks further isolating lower-income residents. “There’s a larger question around digital echo chambers that amplify certain voices,” she says. “Some neighborhoods don’t use these tools, and their perspective might not get heard. On balance I’m a big believer in the positive power of technology, but I recognize that people bring their own biases.”</p><p>In other words, at the end of the day the people next door—whether online or on your porch—are fundamentally people, with all the associated negatives. This week, CityLab is making its own efforts to understand the modern art of neighboring: We’re exploring the best (and worst) ways to build block-level community, examining the forces that drive neighborhoods together or apart, celebrating the joys and outrages of living together, and trying to understand how a divided nation still manages to get along (mostly) when we truly have to. We’re also devoting one day of our Neighbors series to those who have no roofs over their heads—the <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/homeless-project-june-28/530388/?utm_source=feed">more than 500,000 Americans who experience homelessness</a> over the course of year. </p><p>This is an apt focus for CityLab’s first week under <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/what-citylab-looks-like-now/531741/?utm_source=feed">its new design</a>, since we’re in the process of re-introducing ourselves to you, our readers and fellow community members here in the big noisy neighborhood of urban-issues digital media. Please take a moment to poke around the site, check out the new digs, and enjoy some banana bread. (We even have <a href="https://www.zazzle.com/atlanticmedia/gifts?cg=196924976381926554">our own t-shirts</a>.)</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedBrendan McDermid/Reuters It's Time to Meet the Neighbors2017-06-27T12:28:00-04:002017-07-04T21:35:27-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-531792CityLab is spending a week talking about the folks next door.<p>If you’re a frequent CityLab visitor, you’ll notice that things look different around the neighborhood.</p><p>After <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2014/05/introducing-citylabcom-all-things-urban-from-the-atlantic/371038/">three years</a>—an eternity in internet time—this site debuts a fresh design today, only its second major facelift since it originally launched (as Atlantic Cities) back <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/introducing-the-atlantic-cities/245052/">in 2011</a>.</p><p>A few big things right off the bat: The photos, maps, and images are bigger. The typefaces are new. (That’s <a href="https://commercialtype.com/catalog/dala_floda">Dala Floda</a> on headlines now, font fans.) Our logo is now an attention-demanding traffic-light green. And the site is organized somewhat differently. (More on that later.) We’ve also eliminated one of the more-despised features, based on reader feedback—the advertising that appeared mid-post and interrupted the reading experience. Ads in stories (in desktop layout, at least) will now be limited to the right rail of the page, where they can be fully admired or ignored. You’re welcome.</p><p>Overall, the aim of this effort was to make CityLab a more hospitable place for longer, more involving, and more multimedia-laden digital journalism. We’re edging further away from raffish, blog-style content of yore and seeking a cleaner, sharper, more mature vibe. At age six, CityLab is growing up, or at least getting its first job-interview suit.</p><p>The fine tailoring comes courtesy David Somerville, the Atlantic’s gifted creative director, and his able team: design fellow Thanh Do, product design lead DJ Brinkerhoff, and CityLab’s own designer, Madison McVeigh. Over the past few months, an elite squad of developers has been laboring away at this project down the hall from our editorial offices. Lead on the project were Josh West and Jeremy Green, along with CityLab developer Ben Harrison, Jason Goldstein, Kevin Mahoney, Chris Davis, Portia Burton, Frankie Dintino, and Joey Nichols. Under the guidance of Clarissa Matthews, the Atlantic’s indispensable director of product management, they’ve torn CityLab down to the studs and hammered it back together again.</p><p>Along with the cosmetic improvements in this renovation, you’ll notice some structural changes. We went all <a href="http://tidyingup.com/">Marie Kondo</a> on the homepage, uncluttering the top navigation bar and removing the buttons that no longer sparked joy. There are now five main subject categories, or verticals, rather than the eight that were there previously.</p><p>Those five channels are more than just ways to organize our content: They reflect CityLab’s core preoccupations going forward. So let’s explain why we we think they’re so important.</p><ol><li><strong>Design</strong>: This one’s always been a big chunk of the CityLab’s DNA: We’re obsessed with how cities look, as well as how well they work. Expect more attention to architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and historic preservation, aided now by a site that allows us to showcase bigger and better images in our storytelling. </li>
<li><strong>Transportation</strong>: Never has the science, art, and politics of urban mobility been so fascinating. On-demand car services and bike shares are expanding, autonomous vehicles are creeping onto streets, and hyperloops, drones, and gondolas clamor for our future fares. Who gets the freedom of movement in the 21st century? Who and what is driving these rapid changes? And how will our cities look on the other end?</li>
<li><strong>Environment</strong>: The process of reckoning with the globe’s changing climate has begun, and cities are both the nexus of resiliency efforts and the key to preventing environmental catastrophe. This challenge will be the century’s biggest story—even if many of us don’t know it yet.</li>
<li><strong>Equity</strong>: For decades, city planning policies produced or exacerbated inequities across race, class, and gender. Here we examine the structural mechanics and political forces behind this reality, while also exploring the various ways cities are working to address problems in housing, policing, education, employment, and more.</li>
<li><strong>Life</strong>: Cities are fun, interesting, rewarding places to be—but they’re also challenging, complicated, and often overwhelming. That contradiction is a basic truth of city life, one that informs pop culture, politics, and personal experience. This channel—the successor to the Navigator section—will seek to understand why we’re all here, and what it means to be a native of the urban age.</li>
</ol><aside class="callout"><p>It’s also worth talking briefly about the wider context of this relaunch, and the extraordinary political events of the past few months that served as the background music blasting from the contractors’ boombox during our renovation. </p>
</aside><p>This is not a politics site. CityLab was founded to explore the problems and solutions that urban areas face, in the U.S. and globally—to better understand why some cities thrive, and others fail. Sometimes that means celebrating the poetry and pleasures of city life, or raging against its challenges. But more often than not, we deal in the pragmatic and the concrete—often literally. Street design? Yup. Zoning? We’re on it. Want to talk about bike lanes and bridges and bus stops? Welcome to our world. The role of ideology and party politics in CityLab’s voice is muted, by design; former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s familiar maxim that “there’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage” gets a regular airing around here.</p><p>But recent political changes in the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and beyond have made it harder to ignore the role that cities have to play in as actors in a once-in-a-generation political drama. After the November election, the narrative of a “rural uprising” against out-of-touch urban elites took hold, and in the months since, the battle lines have only hardened: Today, urban areas represent an increasingly unified bloc of resistance against a federal government that appears actively hostile to their interests. And throughout the world, the values that cities are often said to embody—cosmopolitanism, tolerance, opportunity, sustainability—are threatened by a diverse cast of foes seeking to undermine them. At the same time, the 21st-century city is serving as an engine of social and economic inequality, a driving force behind the current political divisiveness; that narrative, the topic that consumes CityLab co-founder and contributing editor Richard Florida’s new book, <em>The New Urban Crisis</em>, presents its own grave threats.</p><p>The notion that some fundamentals of urban life are under siege has permeated our understanding in recent months, and we can’t pretend that we’re not taking sides. We’re on Team City. And we’ve never been more aware of how high the stakes are. Cities are, as we and many others have often pointed out, the laboratories of democracy—the places that have committed to solving (or, at least, trying not to worsen) the fundamental problems of human co-habitation. That’s the story that CityLab has always told, and we’ll have a lot of work to do.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedShannon Stapleton/ReutersWhat CityLab Looks Like Now2017-06-27T00:00:00-04:002017-06-27T14:05:26-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-531741Bigger images, fewer ads—and a recommitment to telling a very important story.<p><em>Updated:</em> 2017-06-28 <br /><em>Editor&rsquo;s Note:</em> This post has been updated. <br /></p><p>City officials in Philadelphia recently <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/city/city-stop-paying-panhandlers-text-to-give-instead-20170612.html">announced a “text-to-give” campaign </a>to encourage residents to stop giving money to panhandlers. Instead of dropping change or a dollar bill into a homeless person’s cup at a stoplight or sidewalk, residents were encouraged to text a number to donate $5 to the Mayor’s Fund to End Homelessness, where their money would go toward social services, jobs, and housing programs.</p><p>More funding for social services is a great idea, but some details were left unclear. Should you text-to-give right in front of the homeless individual who has just asked you for change, or wait until you’re a block away? Can you explain to him or her exactly why you’ve chosen to text financial support to the city rather than provide cash, which you fear they would spend on drugs or alcohol? That part is up to you. But the message is clear: Don’t encourage them.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p></p><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">HOMELESS IN AMERICA</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/homelessinamerica/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/day-of-homelessness-mark-makela-reuters.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/homelessinamerica/?utm_source=feed">On June 28, CityLab is taking part in a national conversation about the homeless crisis, and possible solutions.</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/homelessinamerica/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>Philadelphia, like many other cities in Western nations that are churning up ever-greater inequality between their richest and poorest residents, appears to be seeing a spike in homelessness, fed in part by the opioid crisis and by a lack of affordable housing options. Mayor Jim Kenney’s <a href="https://beta.phila.gov/press-releases/mayor/mayor-jim-kenney-and-city-officials-announce-new-homeless-outreach-strategy-targeting-center-city/">campaign</a>—echoing <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Cooper-City-s-campaign-to-end-homelessness-is-11174340.php">similar ones</a> that have been launched in the past by mayors elsewhere—is rooted in a familiar frustration: Elected officials, confronted with the spectacle of destitution on the streets of a city they are determined to uplift, need to tell their voters, and themselves, that they’re doing something about it. And they need to assure their citizens that they shouldn’t feel guilty about averting their eyes, rolling up their windows, and pretending not to notice the humanitarian tragedy in their midst.</p><p>Pope Francis, no stranger either to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/11/pope-francis-opens-free-launderette-poor-homeless-people-rome">homelessness</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/us/pope-francis-philadelphia.html">Philadelphia</a>, has a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/the-pope-on-panhandling-give-without-worry.html">different take</a>. Asked by a Milanese magazine <a href="http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2017/dont-worry-how-its-spent-always-give-homeless-a-handout-pope-says.cfm">about how best to respond to panhandlers</a>, the pontiff was unequivocal. Giving money to the needy, he said, "is always right." It doesn’t matter what you think they’re going to spend it on: You can—you need to—give.</p><p>And that’s not all. As the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/the-pope-on-panhandling-give-without-worry.html">observed in a recent editorial</a>:</p><blockquote>
<p>Then [the Pope] posed a greater challenge. He said the way of giving is as important as the gift. You should not simply drop a bill into a cup and walk away. You must stop, look the person in the eyes, and touch his or her hands.</p>
</blockquote><p>Yeah, I know: Me neither.</p><p>It sounds way too emotionally exhausting. But if it was easy, you probably wouldn’t need the Pope to tell you to do it.</p><p>Last year, a slew of media outlets <a href="http://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/">in San Francisco</a> and <a href="http://crosscut.com/2017/06/homeless-in-seattle-media-blitz/">Seattle</a> gathered to produce and promote <a href="https://sfhomelessproject.com/">a day of blanket coverage</a> on homelessness. CityLab, along with <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/san-francisco-homeless-project-mother-jones/">other national outlets</a>, also <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/brexit-and-san-francisco-ballot-measure-referendum-on-homeless-tent-camp-evictions/489215/?utm_source=feed">participated in this ad-hoc media consortium</a>, which focused heavily on the two West Coast cities known as epicenters of the problem, thanks to their booming economies and acute housing affordability crisis.</p><p>Today, CityLab is renewing its participation in that project: All day, we’ll be posting stories about homelessness and the related housing affordability crisis to our homepage and sharing others on social media.</p><p>We’re doing this for a few reasons. While people are living on the streets <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/map-america-homeless-crisis/522339/?utm_source=feed">in big cities and small towns alike worldwide</a>, in the U.S. it’s <a href="http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/rural">overwhelmingly an urban issue</a>, a disease of affluence, density, and the housing pressures that result when the two combine. And it’s in cities—particularly those increasingly wealthy and unequal ones—where solutions desperately need to emerge. A common adjective in stories about the topic: <em>intractable</em>. That doesn’t technically mean it’s impossible to fix (I just looked it up); it’s just very, very hard. Solutions are what publications like CityLab are built to talk about, and this is a good place to start.</p><p>Over the course of the year experts conservatively estimate that at least 500,000 Americans experience homelessness, nearly a quarter of them children. (Less conservative ones think it’s more like 2 million.) The project’s hashtag, #500KHomeless, speaks to that staggering figure. On most days, I must pass a dozen or more citizens of this shadow city of half a million souls, if not twice that. It’s hard to tell; like many urbanites, I’ve gotten very good at not seeing the problem. Today, I won’t have the option of looking away.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="2214" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/06/unnamed/fddc80cd9.png" width="940"></figure><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedJulie Jacobson/APToday: Homeless in America2017-06-16T12:46:36-04:002017-06-28T13:25:41-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-530388Why we’re sharing stories about homelessness today.<p>In college, I worked a summer as a bike messenger in the late 1980s, which was roughly when that profession—pre-email—was enjoying a swashbuckling pop-culture mini-renaissance. (Remember when <a href="https://cyclehistory.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/bike-wars-the-new-york-midtown-bike-ban-1987/">Ed Koch tried to ban them</a>? And <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koRKdhiF1Tw">this guy</a>?) Equipped with the hefty 10-speed I’d gotten for my 13th birthday and a helmet I’d borrowed from my friend Doug, the only person I knew who had one, I rolled into Magic Messenger, Baltimore’s best and only bike messenger company, and rolled home with a job on two wheels.</p><p>I’d set out every morning with pockets bulging with quarters, for the pay phones we used to communicate with the dispatcher, and puff home 8 hours later, staggered by heat and bus fumes. It was very much <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPTu2F450sk">not like the Kevin Bacon movie <em>Quicksilver</em></a>. The best riders could take home $200 a week or more. I did not, because I was terrible at it—timid and slow—but it was still a great gig.</p><p>The city revealed itself to the messengers; we knew every elevator, every alley shortcut, and every public bathroom in town. (The best: the glorious restrooms in the golden spire of what was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Building_(Baltimore)">then called the Maryland National Bank building</a>.) Being a sweaty and helmeted biker in delivery mode gave you an open ticket to appear in any workplace and roam around at will; over the course of the summer, I found myself in a kosher meatpacker in East Baltimore, where I was given a free hot dog, and in a warehouse factory that made fake eyeballs (it’s now a upscale live-work space). On a bike, silent and unannounced and unnoticed, you can see the weird ways a city really works.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Bike Week</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/bike-week/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/rtsn8y3.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/bike-week/?utm_source=feed">Urban life on two wheels </a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/bike-week/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>Baltimore has changed enormously in (holy crap) nearly 30 years. Its topography is as familiar as ever—I think I’m dodging some of the same potholes—but when I ride around now I’m usually in the company of others on bikes. This was once unheard of. I don’t ever recall seeing any recreational riders or bike commuters on city streets back in the 1980s, just a scraggly and lawless little mob of messengers. There were no bike lanes, either, needless to say. Now, riding home from work after dark, I might be part of a stream of cyclists—young and old, men and women—plying a new cycle-track that runs up the city’s spine, our blinking red lights climbing northward for blocks. Just in the last several years, the uptick in our numbers is noticeable: Even on the foulest and wettest winter days—in the middle of a city that is on no one’s list of <a href="http://www.bicycling.com/culture/news/the-50-best-bike-cities-of-2016">most bike-friendly burgs</a>—I’m never alone out there any more.</p><p>It’s tempting to see a seismic shift in changes like these, which have been paralleled in other cities nationwide that have launched bike-share programs, installed bike infrastructure, and encouraged commuters to ride to work. As our Richard Florida <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/05/mapping-americas-bike-commuters/526923/?utm_source=feed">points out</a>, this urban bike boom is in part an optical illusion: The bicycle’s share of the commuting pie is increasing, but it remains slender, except in a handful of college towns and West Coast cities. Beyond these bike-centric bubbles, Americans are getting off their bikes: Ridership has dropped since 2000. Bicycle sales are down. Most troublingly for those who plot an enduring bike restoration in American cities, the decline is particularly sharp among children: In 2000, more than 11 million kids’ bikes were sold in the U.S.; by 2013, it was less than 5 million.</p><p>In Margaret Guroff’s <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/05/the-great-leveler/527355/?utm_source=feed">cultural history of the bicycle, <em>The Mechanical Horse</em>,</a> you can see a sobering pattern in the cyclical bike boomlets and busts that have defined the bike’s journey through American life since the 19th century: Toys for the affluent, then tools for workers, and then back again. What will be the thing, she asks, “that will finally make city cycling <em>normal?</em>”</p><p>That’s one of the questions CityLab will be exploring this coming week as we explore the bicycle’s role in shaping urban space, and its prospects for finally finding an enduring place there. The numbers of riders may be small, but in cities that struggle with issues like traffic congestion and social fragmentation, they can play an outsized role in helping communities function better. As Guroff writes, “The automobile may have annihilated time and space on the interstate … but in a car-choked city, it is once again the bike that magically shrinks the distance between here and there, allowing riders to percolate through the gridlock while drivers sit and fume.”</p><p>In other words, cities make bikes make sense, and vice-versa. That’s what I discovered almost 30 years ago (again: holy crap), and it’s even more true today.</p><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedAPNew York City Mayor John Lindsay leads a group ride in 1970. When Will Bikes Rule the City? 2017-05-19T11:07:59-04:002018-01-02T12:48:15-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-527364CityLab explores the ever-changing role of the bicycle, the machine that makes cities better. <p>How much do you love transit? Does your passion for fixed-rail infrastructure so fill your heart that you must break out in song?</p><p>For singer-songwriter Kyle Thompson-Westra, the answer is apparently yes. At a rally today organized by <a href="http://www.purplelinenow.com/">Purple Line NOW</a> in support of <a href="http://www.purplelinemd.com/en/">the Purple Line</a>, a proposed light-rail line between Bethesda in Montgomery County and New Carrollton in Prince George’s County, he busted out a folksy ode to the unbuilt 16-mile, suburb-to-suburb connector. </p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">A <a href="https://twitter.com/purplelinenow">@purplelinenow</a> song... feel free to sing along. <a href="https://t.co/6m8seAOnht">pic.twitter.com/6m8seAOnht</a></p>
— Rushern L. Baker III (@CountyExecBaker) <a href="https://twitter.com/CountyExecBaker/status/859394557359869952">May 2, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>The song, which can be heard <a href="https://ktwmusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-purple-line">in its entirety here</a>, lays out the urbanist case for the Purple Line in impressively wonky detail. (Sample verse: “Fighting dated zoning and suburban sprawl/Building pleasant communities to benefit all.“)</p><p>This got the CityLab staff, whose devotion to public transportation is also formidable, thinking hard about other songs in praise of the oft-embattled mobility modes that keep the urban world rolling. From “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_eE0NPArEY">Mystery Train</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZPToXstS8M">Folsom Prison Blues</a>” to “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyT9jTW7MHc">Love Train</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMS_ykiLiQ">City of New Orleans</a>,” songwriters have long been drawn to the rhythm of the rails. But streetcars, subways, and buses tend to get less musical love. Or so you’d think. Once we started coming up with transit tunes, we literally could not stop. (Especially after we <a href="https://twitter.com/graciemckenzie/status/859433271075188738">reached out to people on Twitter</a> for suggestions. Keep them coming!) Here are a few favorites, plus the ever-growing CityLab Spotify playlist of transit-oriented grooves.</p><p>Months ago, <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/09/the-streetcar-cant-save-your-city/501014/?utm_source=feed">I raved </a>about <a href="http://kcstreetcar.org/get-out/">“Get Out” by Kansas City’s Kemet the Phantom</a>, which is just way better than any promotional song for a modestly scaled Midwest city’s streetcar line has any right to be. Here it is again. You’re welcome.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xa_lfMoDqI&amp;feature=youtu.be
"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F_Xa_lfMoDqI%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_Xa_lfMoDqI&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F_Xa_lfMoDqI%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><p>And for fans of <a href="https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/03/the-cars-that-ate-paris/520710/?utm_source=feed">Parisian mobility</a> and/or louche Europop, here’s a throwback number from Serge Gainsbourg, an early hit about a ticket-taker battling ennui in the Metro of the late 1950s.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CHHsd46rcc"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F7CHHsd46rcc%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7CHHsd46rcc&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F7CHHsd46rcc%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div><p>Mark Byrnes suggested a pair of odes to Canadian mass transit; both are as relentlessly good-natured and unselfconsciously ridiculous as Canada itself. First, let’s all enjoy Canadiana-purveyor and national treasure Stompin’ Tom Connors, who <a href="http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20130309.OBCONNORS0308ATL/BDAStory/BDA/deaths/?pageRequested=all">so loved his hat that he refused to take it off when he met the Queen. </a></p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://youtu.be/xi96V96ZMHE"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fxi96V96ZMHE%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dxi96V96ZMHE&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fxi96V96ZMHE%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div><p>Wait, come back! Here are <a href="http://www.shuffledemons.com/">the Shuffle Demons</a>! The outfits! The berets! The sort-of-rapping! It can only be 1986 in Toronto.</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FKZnLjRi_g9o%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DKZnLjRi_g9o&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FKZnLjRi_g9o%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></p><p>Brentin Mock reached back to 1996 for his pick, “C'mon N' Ride It (The Train),” from Florida’s Quad City DJs. Truly, an unstoppable groove:</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gEdQ5KpY8Y&amp;feature=youtu.be"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F5gEdQ5KpY8Y%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D5gEdQ5KpY8Y&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F5gEdQ5KpY8Y%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><p>For Tanvi Misra, nothing can top the late-’90s Rudy-Giuliani-bashing of Kathleen Hanna and her lo-fi bandmates in Le Tigre, who really loved the NYC subway:</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT1zzc-hVCY
">
<div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT1zzc-hVCY"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FsT1zzc-hVCY%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DsT1zzc-hVCY&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FsT1zzc-hVCY%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div>
</div><p>For Amanda Kolson Hurley, memories of being a grad student abroad accompany the Divine Comedy’s "National Express," an ode to the U.K.'s main inter-city bus (sorry, <em>coach</em>) line. Despite the general mood of depression on board, a ride on the National Express holds the tantalizing possibility of escape: "We’re going where the air is free,” Neil Hannon sings.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F-Fw73dBJGss%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-Fw73dBJGss&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F-Fw73dBJGss%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss"></div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss">Laura Bliss’s L.A. roots are showing with her pick, which ignores public transit entirely. “Nobody walks in L.A.” sings Missing Persons’s Dale Bozzio, bemoaning the lack of SoCal pedestrianism in this classic love/hate song to the City of Angels:</div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FR_UpLtGEWoY%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DR_UpLtGEWoY&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FR_UpLtGEWoY%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss"></div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss">If you’re stuck in gridlock, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/thisiscitylab/playlist/6dFdC7G2ZoJW9czK42rz2N">here’s our full playlist</a>.</div><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fw73dBJGss"></div><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="380" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fembed.spotify.com%2F%3Furi%3Dspotify%3Auser%3Athisiscitylab%3Aplaylist%3A6dFdC7G2ZoJW9czK42rz2N&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fuser%2Fthisiscitylab%2Fplaylist%2F6dFdC7G2ZoJW9czK42rz2N&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fmosaic.scdn.co%2F640%2Fc75bd18770bdd7e63758e47052d67127a213512b7119742c382f837113373e6e61c67202e7973dd649f6531414ed5728a80ef330448e6417b5a896faecc0f0d9e99e8a409d01ac27b045edc90cb3c5dc&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=spotify" width="300"></iframe></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedLucas Jackson/ReutersGrooving to the sweet sounds of transit-centric tunes. CityLab's Essential Transit Tunes2017-05-02T16:22:58-04:002017-05-03T11:19:58-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-525111We’re looking for the best songs about subways, buses, streetcars, and trains.<p>In a town hall last week, Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, was asked about the Obama-era internet privacy regulations that he had voted to strike down. The 2016 FCC rules prevented service providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&amp;T from selling your browsing history to advertisers without your consent. Or, they would have, starting in December, if they’d been allowed to take effect, <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/10/14881068/fcc-privacy-rules-fight-web-history-ads">which they weren’t</a>. “You know, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/nobodys-got-to-use-the-internet-a-gop-lawmakers-response-to-concerns-about-web-privacy/?utm_term=.80ba0d6f354d">nobody’s got to use the internet</a>,” Sensenbrenner told his aggrieved constituent.</p><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Open Secrets</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/open-secrets/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/open-secrets-bug-photo.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/open-secrets/?utm_source=feed">Revealing the invisible city </a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/open-secrets/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>True enough! But people on the internet still objected to this formulation, noting that a great many working adults would find it very difficult indeed to find jobs or navigate their daily lives without internet access. Just 13 percent of American adults are taking Sensenbrenner’s advice these days, <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/">according to Pew Research Center</a>. Most are, like the 73-year-old congressman, older—41 percent of those 65 and up say they never go online. Rural Americans are twice as likely to be internet non-users than urban or suburban dwellers; the phenomenon is also correlated with low income and educational attainment. The vast majority are not staying offline to avoid the prying eyes of the Man: Only 3 percent <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-why/">cite privacy concerns</a>. Most just say they’re not interested, or it’s too expensive or difficult to learn. Along with pristine blank-slate browsing histories and minds <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hampster-dance">unclouded by meme exposure</a>, those who have sworn off online interactions also have the opportunity to preserve the mystery and awe of the pre-web world, a time when finding stuff out involved opening books, <a href="http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/10/the-public-librarians-who-still-serve-as-human-google/504506/?utm_source=feed">making phone calls</a>, and physically leaving your immediate surroundings.</p><p>It’s tempting to romanticize this era, but there was a lot of schlepping involved. I belong to that sliver of the Gen X population that began its working years before widespread web access, and while intellectually I realize that I am the same person doing the same basic job, the poky rhythms of life before the Information Superhighway moved in now feel very alien indeed. Huge amounts of time and energy were once poured into the pursuit of questions that are now answered in the time it takes to type them.</p><p>I worked at alternative weeklies and city magazines, where the bills got paid with gala annual “Best of...” issues that often promised to reveal the “Secrets of the City.” These issues live on, of course, though the sense of occasion has diminished now that a session on Yelp can yield a similar, if not objectively better, set of results. Back, then, though, we took these responsibilities at least semi-seriously, since sussing out the Best Bar to Play Darts required phone calls and shoe leather and luck. (However, it was harder for readers of yore to angrily complain that you’d gotten it wrong.) The un-Googleable city was a fortress of secrets. And, once you’d penetrated it and determined (as I once did) where the best hole-in-the-wall Caribbean carry-out or Urban Fishing Hole was, you were likely to claim, righteously, that you’d <a href="http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6976820/columbusing-discovering-things-for-white-people"><em>discovered</em></a> the place.</p><p>It’s a bit harder to make these statements now, though <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/06/328466757/columbusing-the-art-of-discovering-something-that-is-not-new">many still do</a>. The city has no more secrets; everything and (almost) everyone is online, somewhere. We all became curators, not discoverers. But there’s still a value is surfacing these curios and artifacts and exposing them to new eyes.</p><p>This week, CityLab will be looking around for these not-quite-secrets and talking about why cities remain the best places to find them. Even the indexed, mapped, and fully searchable cities of the online age harbor their obscure corners and gnomic rituals, from speakeasies and private social clubs to forgotten landmarks and hidden infrastructure. Indeed, there’s a case to be made that the density and clamor of the urban environment provides just the camouflage that a true privacy-seeker requires today to truly get lost, online or off.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedBrian Snyder/ReutersHiding in Plain Sight2017-04-17T11:42:00-04:002017-04-17T13:50:19-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-523203This week: Stories about the sort-of-secrets of the city. <p>Look at this:</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Ever tried a Coney...pizza? You can buy one at home <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Detroit?src=hash">#Detroit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/tigers">@tigers</a> games at Comerica Park this season, and more new concession foods. <a href="https://t.co/T2h45T6deS">pic.twitter.com/T2h45T6deS</a></p>
— TyCliff (@_TylerTheTyler_) <a href="https://twitter.com/_TylerTheTyler_/status/847510782443048961">March 30, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>It’s a Detroit-style pizza, a much-beloved specialty, which as Kriston Capps <a href="http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/03/why-detroit-serves-square-pizza-and-other-lessons-from-where-to-eat-pizza-phaidon/474501/?utm_source=feed">discussed here</a>, is a square Sicilian-style pie traditionally baked on an auto-parts tray. (<a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/2017/02/how-to-make-detroit-style-pizza.html">Here’s </a>an exhaustive explainer on how to make your own.)</p><p>However, in this case the crust is topped by the components of another, completely unrelated <a href="http://firstwefeast.com/features/best-hot-dogs-in-america/">Detroit-area specialty, the “Coney”</a>—a hot dog with chili, chopped onion, and mustard.</p><p>Most people would agree that this is disgusting. It <em>sort of</em> makes sense—<a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/what-is-a-detroit-coney-hot-dog.html">Coney sauce isn’t chili,</a> after all, at least not in the Texas sense; it’s a fine-grained Mediterranean-spiced ground-beef slurry not entirely unlike an Italian <em>ragu</em>, served in diners and atop hot dogs in many Midwest burgs. In its related guise as Cincinnati chili, the same basic substance is served on spaghetti.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>So it’s not a great conceptual leap to use this as pizza sauce. But then you get these cut-up hot dog slices and raw onions and the squirts of yellow mustard, and, well, c’mon. Just stop.</p><p>They’re serving this at Comerica Park in Detroit this summer, as part of the Major League Baseball’s <a href="http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/04/the-7-most-gloriously-disgusting-ballpark-snacks-of-2015/389381/?utm_source=feed">ongoing metamorphosis</a> from sports league into a purveyor of regional-atrocity stunt foods. Eating and drinking at the ballpark may be one America’s <a href="http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/04/do-baseball-stadiums-need-trendy-food/476352/?utm_source=feed">quintessential urban pleasures</a>, but in the modern era it has also become an excuse to shock visitors with wiggy misinterpretations of the host city’s local delicacies. (See also: <a href="https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2014/08/13/concession-food-item-week-crab-mac-cheese-hot-dog">The crab-and-macaroni-and-cheese-topped hot dogs</a> of Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s stoner-hallucination <a href="http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/03/cleveland-indians-hot-dog-froot-loops-why">Froot-Loop-topped dogs</a>.</p><p>No lifestyle-pages Opening Day preview package is complete without a rundown of these delights. Harmless fun for the locals; you can go to a D-back game, pay $25 for<a href="http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/10626853/arizona-diamondbacks-sell-25-d-bat-corn-dog"> a lethal bacon-and-cheese-filled jalapeño corndog</a>, and resolve never to do it again. But for those who trek to Cleveland or Kansas City in the hopes of getting a taste of that city’s soul, there’s something pernicious about the phenomenon of running multiple unrelated hometown dishes through the regional delicacy generator and eating the resulting mess. A Detroit Coney Pizza demeans both Coney and pizza—and does no favors for the eater, either.</p><p>I should mention that several colleagues disagree on this point, as this intra-office Slack conversation proves.</p><figure><img alt="" height="431" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/04/Screen_Shot_2017_04_04_at_10.57.18_AM/b538921f4.png" width="620"></figure><p>(Note that CityLab staffer Jessica Hester, who has Detroit-area roots, also claims to want to eat <a href="http://www.freep.com/story/life/food/2017/02/27/american-coney-island-coney-paczki/98483116/">this</a>.)</p><p>Such shenanigans are not limited to ballparks, and they are not new. Since the 1980s, roughly around the time of the Great Cajun Blackening, the nation’s theme restaurants and fast-casual outlets have made an art out of taking regional dishes, turning them into Buffalo Chicken Caesar Salads, and stuffing them into burritos. A Coney pizza is far from the worst offender in the genre. Look at Cincinnati’s <a href="http://pi-pizza.com/happy-hour">Pi Pizzeria</a>, which serves a chili-sauce-topped deep-dish that works in a <em>third</em> unrelated regional foodstuff—goetta, a scrapple-like loaf of organ meats and oatmeal that normal people eat for breakfast.</p><figure><a href="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpi.cincinnati%2Fposts%2F946514392074327"><img alt="" height="701" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/04/Screen_Shot_2017_04_04_at_3.09.31_PM/c2ebb2cde.png" width="511"></a>
<figcaption class="credit"></figcaption></figure><p>This isn’t a food-grump’s plea for “authenticity,” a word rendered meaningless by the American melting pot’s ceaseless churn. Culinary snobbery is tiresome, whether pedants are arguing about the <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/bouillabaisse-a-la-marseillaise-3598197/">correct bouillabaisse </a>or proper <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/25/garden/toasted-ravioli-the-secret-of-st-louis.html">St. Louis toasted ravioli.</a> But great regional foods are a finite resource, and they should be handled with respect. Like so many elements of American life worth talking about, most of them were born of immigrants—the early 20th-century Macedonians <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/chili-dog-melting-pot/518202/">who gave us Coneys </a>were refugees from the Balkan wars—determined to re-interpret the cuisines of their homelands to appeal to their new neighbors. These were dishes of poverty and desperation and enthusiasm. Buffalo wings became a thing not only because they are amazing, but because wings<a href="http://buffalonews.com/2014/09/26/feb-2-1972-chicken-wing-debuts-pages-news/"> used to cost nine cents a pound.</a> They deserve to be consumed as with at least some awareness of their inventors’ original intentions.</p><p>Instead, like exhausted rock stars, we’re mindlessly remixing our greatest hits, in ever-more-unappealing combinations. It’s no accident that the main players in the stunt-food canon began life as the immigrant fare of industrial cities. Having extracted so many other things of value from the Rust Belt, from jobs to residents, the rest of the nation is now ruthlessly exploiting its last great resource—its world-class trove of deep-friend and delicious bar foods. Someday, for this and <a href="http://www.demos.org/publication/price-tag-being-young-climate-change-and-millennials-economic-future">many other reasons</a>, our children will curse our names.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedLittle Caesar's/CityLabConey Dogs and pizza should be separate foods.Detroit Coney Pizza Is the Worst 2017-04-04T15:11:00-04:002017-04-04T15:17:54-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-521826Just stop.<p>American voters are a forgiving lot. As they demonstrated frequently in 2016, when truly intent on “sending a message,” the electorate will marshal its resentments, grit its teeth, and vote for truly appalling political figures, no matter what horrible thing they said, did, claimed to do, or promised never to do again. But woe betide the big-city mayor who fumbles the fundamental test of municipal governance: snow plowing. For that, there will be no forgiveness.</p><p>From the mayors’ perspectives, it may be frustrating to be judged so harshly on an uncontrollable weather event, but the bottom line is that constituents want their streets cleared. The snowplow is the mightiest tool in the mayoral arsenal; in many voters’ minds, freeing their cars is perhaps the clearest evidence that City Hall can accomplish anything at all. Failing to wield it properly is a quick way to lose your job.</p><p>Ask John V. Lindsay, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/21/nyregion/john-v-lindsay-mayor-and-maverick-dies-at-79.html">matinee-idol New York City mayor</a> whose political ascendance was flattened by 15 inches of frozen precipitation on February 9, 1969. The Nor’easter storm hit on a Sunday but somehow managed to kill 42 people, mostly because forecasters were fooled (it was supposed to rain) and the city was spectacularly unprepared, with almost half of its snow-fighting equipment idled by lax maintenance. Come Monday, <a href="https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/remembering-a-snowstorm-that-paralyzed-the-city/">the city was completely immobilized</a>; even the New York Stock Exchange failed to open. </p><p>Lindsay, a patrician type who frequently battled with labor unions and what used to be called “white ethnic” voters, took the brunt of the blame when, three days after the storm, streets remained impassible in working-class Queens even as Manhattan children returned to school. When the mayor tried to make his way to the borough to inspect the situation, his limo got stuck and residents harassed him mercilessly. The moment would be “a watershed in the history of municipal services,” the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101230231446/http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1998/10/22/1998-10-22_winter_of_discontent_lindsay.html"><em>New York Daily News</em> reported in 1998</a>. Lindsay, elected as a Republican in ’65, lost his party’s nomination later that year but eked out reelection as his two opponents split the vote; still, his political fortunes took a turn for the worse, thanks to what is still known as “Lindsay’s Snowstorm.”</p><p>Many a City Hall career has been cut short by snowflakes, including that of Chicago’s <u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/us/michael-bilandic-daley-successor-in-chicago-dies-at-78.html">Michael A. Bilandic</a></u>, who insisted on aggressively ticketing cars buried in the unplowed streets after a series of blizzards in January 1979. “The city's snow removal was so terrible that people guessed Mayor [Richard] Daley must have taken the snowplows with him,” Bildanic’s <em>New York Times</em> obituary recalled. “A former deputy mayor was found to have received a $90,000 consultant's contract for snow removal.”</p><p>A month later, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-the-blizzard-that-got-jane-byrne-elected-20141114-story.html">“an avalanche of snow protest votes”</a> ushered him out of office, the <em>Chicago Tribune</em> reported.</p><p>Denver Mayor Bill McNichols <a href="http://harbortownhistories.com/blog/?p=249">met a similar fate</a> after a big Christmas Eve storm hit while officials were in holiday mode in 1982. The Office of Emergency Preparedness didn’t even open until 33 hours after the blizzard stopped. <a href="http://blogs.denverpost.com/library/2012/12/18/blizzard-christmas-1982-buried-denver/5157/">Voters remembered this come spring</a>, ending <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/2006/11/30/a-setback-not-a-blizzard/">McNichols’s 15-year run</a> in City Hall.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>More recently, the eco-friendly Seattle mayor Greg Nickels faced fierce criticism <a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/after-storm-of-criticism-seattle-mayor-reverses-no-salt-policy-for-snow/">for failing to salt the streets</a> because of environmental concerns in 2009; the city’s bungled and ineffective snow removal later launched investigations, and Nickels was gone by summer. Marveling at his swift fall, <a href="http://www.governing.com/blogs/politics/Lessons-from-Mayor-Greg.html"><em>Governing </em>observed </a>that “snowstorms have a unique way of undermining the political standing of mayors …. First and foremost, citizens want their mayors to do the basics well.”</p><p>The key lesson: Don’t screw up the optics—Lindsay might have powered through the controversy if his limo didn’t get stuck in Queens. And never underestimate the power of the aggrieved voter-motorist. Even in relatively transit-friendly cities like New York or Chicago, Americans get tetchy when they can’t get their cars out. The robust political power of car owners is seen not only in highway funding and gas taxes, but in the urgency city leaders devote to this chore.</p><p>In snow-intensive cities, that plow-or-perish compact between citizens and elected officials must be taken seriously. The expectations seem to get lower the farther south you go. After a feeble response to an Atlanta ice storm in 2014, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-snowfall-stopped-a-rising-political-star">pundits predicted political doom</a> for Kasim Reed, the city’s charismatic mayor. He’s still there, with a <a href="http://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/mayor-kasim-reed-whats-store-final-15-months-administration/">healthy approval rating. </a>And Washington, D.C., has a long history of ineffective snow remediation. It would be hard to do the basics as poorly as Mayor Marion Barry did in 1987, when a blizzard struck the city while the mayor was attending the Super Bowl in Pasadena. Instead of flying back to man the podium for the usual obligatory photo-ops with plow drivers, Barry stayed in L.A. for a week, disappearing <a href="http://blogs.weta.org/boundarystones/2014/11/13/1987-blizzard-discontent">on what turned out to be a cocaine binge. </a></p><p>Despite the public outrage, Barry ruled on. His explanation: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/dc/barry/87prof.htm">“We’re not a snow town</a>.”</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedReuters Snowstorm Mayors: Don't Blow This2017-03-14T10:30:00-04:002017-03-14T17:00:29-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-519477As history shows, failing to deal with post-storm clean-up can doom city leaders.<p>There’s something wrong with <a href="http://kongskullislandmovie.com/"><em>Kong: Skull Island</em></a>. The new retelling of the durable giant-gorilla myth is already <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/weekend-box-office-kong-skull-island-scales-61m-no-1-finish-985412">on its way to being a box-office hit</a>, but it departs from the 1933 original and its two remakes in several ways. This time, the eponymous ape gets a colon and an upsizing—he’s 100 feet tall, which is ludicrous; previous Kongs hovered between 25 and 50 feet. The film is set in 1973, and it leans heavily on Francis Ford Coppola’s <em>Apocalypse Now </em>(and <em>that</em> film’s source material, Joseph Conrad’s novella <em>Heart of Darkness</em>) for inspiration, though some reviewers <a href="http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/8/14838538/kong-skull-island-review-king-kong-godzilla">have pointed out</a> that <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/03/09/518778017/in-the-forgettable-kong-skull-island-a-great-cast-cast-aside">these allusive exertions add up to little</a> beyond some cool visuals.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44LdLqgOpjo
"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F44LdLqgOpjo%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D44LdLqgOpjo&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F44LdLqgOpjo%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><p>But the most glaring departure from Kong canon is the absence of the usual third act, in which the kidnapped monster meets his doom in New York City. </p><p>This is a problem: Kong without the city is no Kong at all.</p><p>The Kong narrative template is simple but effective. Act one: Overconfident Americans, armed with cameras and firearms, set off for a primitive island, smelling plunder and adventure. Act two: They encounter Kong, the inexplicably large gorilla who rules the island; mayhem and monster-fighting ensue. Act three: A captured Kong is taken in chains to civilization but escapes, rampaging through Gotham before dying a hero’s death on the smashed sidewalk. There’s a reason why the posters for previous <em>Kong</em>s usually don’t focus on the Skull Island part of the story, though that part absorbs far more of the films’ running time: Kong only transforms into an epic tragic character once he hits Manhattan and starts bashing his way through the concrete jungle, swatting down elevated railcars and planes. On his island, he’s just a big ape.</p><p>“He was a king and a god in the world he knew,” barks the Barnum-esque Carl Denham, in the 1933 film’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw3O30xGTvE">second-most famous lines</a>. “But now he comes to civilization merely a captive—a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, <em>look at Kong!”</em></p><p>The original story is credited to co-producer/co-writer/co-director Merian C. Cooper, who styled the Denham character on himself. But for anyone alive today, it probably feels pre-baked into the culture. The inspiration for Kong is said to have sprung into Cooper’s head when he saw an airplane flying past the spire of what was then the tallest the building in the world, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Life_Building">New York Life Insurance Building</a>. For the movie, Cooper was able to use the just-completed Empire State Building. To make his monster, he needed the the city first.</p><p>Reviewers at the time understood that the power of the film—the collision of nature and civilization—relied upon those final moments, when the great beast finds itself dwarfed, and then defeated, by the works of modern man. “What is to be seen at work in <em>King Kong</em> is the American imagination faithfully adhering to its characteristic process of multiplication,” the critic William Troy <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/king-kong/">wrote in <em>The Nation</em></a> when the film came out. “Kong is a veritable skyscraper among the apes.”</p><p>Everyone seems to hate the 1976 remake; its gorilla-suit effects have aged poorly, and the campy tone and performances (including a pre-Dude Jeff Bridges as a hippie paleontologist) are hard to swallow. But idea of an ape-among-the skyscrapers still works. When Kong climbs the World Trade Center, then a new marvel on the New York skyline, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AltLpd20LM">leaps between the Twin Towers</a>, the film achieves a kind of soaring pop poetry—perhaps more so now, since <a href="https://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/938-the-scarred-skyline-the-world-trade-center-on-film/">we know what becomes of these two American icons</a>.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AltLpd20LM
"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F2AltLpd20LM%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2AltLpd20LM&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F2AltLpd20LM%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><p>The giant-monster-in-the-city trope is now so familiar that it seems odd that it had to be invented at all. Monsters destroy cities; it’s what they do. The original 1954 <em>Godzilla</em> transplanted the idea to Tokyo and made its beast <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10788996/Godzilla-why-the-Japanese-original-is-no-joke.html">nuclear Armageddon incarnate</a>. Kong, <a href="http://www.popmatters.com/feature/150816-from-spectacle-to-elegy-the-cinematic-myth-of-king-kong/">depending on whom you ask, </a>is animated by a queasy mix of anxieties about colonialism, masculinity, sexual domination, and race. “Whites have sometimes spoken of the movie as a racial slur, but the black men that I've known have always loved it,” the <em>New</em> <em>Yorker</em>’s Pauline Kael wrote <a href="http://www.pulpanddagger.com/canuck/kkreviews.html">in her (rave!) review </a>of the ‘76 remake. “It was their own special urban gorilla-guerrilla fantasy: to be a king in your own country, to be brought here in chains, to be so strong that you could roar your defiance at the top of the big city and go down in a burst of glory.”</p><p>The new Kong loses much of this weirdness—he’s really too big to relate to the human characters at all, and has no city to defy. He’s also deprived of his martyrdom, since this film is an exercise in franchise-building. <em>Skull Island</em> is part of a shared “MonsterVerse” that the ape will eventually share with Godzilla and other Japanese-bred <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju">kaiju</a></em>, in their Americanized forms, for some kind of 2020 showdown that would have totally blown my mind when I was 8 years old. Presumably, we will get our share of urban destruction then.</p><p>I’m sure this will look a lot less ridiculous than the last time the two shared top billing, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KJtxLaD3g">1962,</a> But it’s still fundamentally wrong to reduce the Eighth Wonder of the World to a recurring role in a monster supergroup. He’s lost his whole raison d’etre, the cautionary narrative that so many newcomers to the big city can relate to—to pine for something impossible, stand briefly atop the tallest building in town, and die alone on the streets below.</p><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedAPKong in his proper habitat: The top of the Empire State Building The Problem With 'Kong'2017-03-12T23:01:04-04:002017-03-18T14:05:28-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-519312The latest big gorilla romp is full of spectacle and explosions, but it’s missing something very important.<p>On February 16, a team of Canadian real estate developers announced a partnership with singer Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Holdings Inc. to create a Buffett-branded “active adult” community, dubbed Latitude Margaritaville, in Daytona Beach, Florida. As <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2017/02/16/nearly-1b-daytona-beach-community-inks.html">the <em>Orlando Business Journal</em></a> reported, the scope of the nearly $1 billion project is vast: some 6,900 homes, along with 200,000-square-feet of retail, a band shell for live performances, and a free shuttle to the beach for the 55-and-up residents of this age-restricted retirement village.</p><p>“We are thrilled to be partnering with Margaritaville to put the exclamation point on fun living for active adults,” said <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/search/results?q=Bill%20Bullock">Bill Bullock</a>, senior vice president of developer <a href="http://www.minto.com/">Minto Communities</a>, in a prepared statement.</p><figure><img alt="" height="348" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/02/minto/b672bfbf0.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">A rendering of Buffet’s future terrain. (Courtesy <a href="https://blog.margaritaville.com/2017/02/margaritaville-holdings-minto-communities-announce-partnership/">Margaritaville/Minto Communities</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>The prospect of spending one’s golden years in a Jimmy-Buffettized tequila-cheeseburger haze may seem like a lifestyle with limited appeal, but do not underestimate the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrothead">Parrothead</a> planetary domination agenda. Buffett’s Margaritaville Holdings has managed to parlay the 70-year-old singer/songwriter’s 1977 hit into a business empire, with a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/media/jimmy-buffetts-margaritaville-is-a-state-of-mind-and-an-empire.html?mtrref=seniorhousingnews.com&amp;gwh=95C77A392B5283BEB1A6044D4E1F1C17&amp;gwt=pay">growing network of restaurants, resorts, microbrews, cruises, and sundry lifestyle enhancements.</a></p><p>Senior living is a canny play, given the advancing age of the Parrothead Nation. And the model that Buffett and company are apparently pursuing, according to <a href="http://seniorhousingnews.com/2017/02/21/jimmy-buffett-meets-villages-1-billion-florida-development/">Senior Housing News</a>, is an ambitious one: Latitude Margaritaville aims to rival the Villages, the colossal planned gerotopia outside Orlando that stands as the world’s largest age-restricted community.</p><figure><img alt="" height="413" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/02/aerial/89a057562.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Among the cul-de-sacs of the Villages. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)</figcaption></figure><p>The Villages, a planned city of nearly 160,000 souls embedded in a Central Florida landscape ribboned with golf-cart highways, has long been an object of fascination: Its cultural attributes, racial and political homogeneity, and general weirdness has inspired <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/likethebreadorthedressing/seven-days-and-nights-in-the-worlds-largest-rowdiest-retirem?utm_term=.ukn3mXa8n#.tgYgj0P8v">stunt journalism</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2657325/Ten-women-man-black-market-Viagra-thriving-swingers-scene-Welcome-The-Villages-Florida-elderly-residents-Sex-Square-cocktail-honor-woman-68-arrested-public-sex-toyboy.html">tabloid exposes</a>, and a deeply researched <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/books/review/Leland-t.html">pop-anthropology tome</a>. A Buffett-centric variation on this blueprint might be interesting. The original already goes heavy on the cocktail lifestyle, but it comes with <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trumps-graying-army/505274/">a side of hardcore conservatism</a>: Villages voters break heavily for the GOP. (And, with 80 percent turnout, the development’s outdoor-bar-equipped town squares are <em>de rigueur</em> whistle stops for Republican candidates.) Politically, Margaritavillians might offer a more progressive counterweight to their neighbors to the west, as the nation’s eco-minded head-of-state has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/31/buffett-bon-jovi-and-mccartney-join-clinton-for-star-studded-fundraiser/?utm_term=.5745bd4fec30">campaigned for Democrat candidates in the past. </a></p><p>But the real question looming in advance of the world’s first dad-rock-icon-branded planned city is: Who’s next? The Rolling Stones can’t tour forever, and it’s frankly surprising that more boomer idols haven’t dipped their business models into the senior living sector. I’m ready to put down my deposit to move into a cabinette in Led Zeppelinopolis, if the band’s lawyers can work out the details.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedCarlo Allegri/ReutersWastin' away again at a Florida retirement community.To Live and Die in Margaritaville2017-02-24T16:13:46-05:002017-02-24T16:13:47-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-517836Behold the first dad-rock-branded retirement city.<p>The other evening, as I watched a Taurus drift deliberately into my lane, I prepared to brake and shriek an obscenity. Because I had several moments of warning as it nosed its way in for an un-indicated right turn, I managed to avoid the phrase that usually explodes out of my mouth in genuine emergencies, and will undoubtedly be my last words if one of these encounters proves fatal: <em>JESUS F*CKING CHRIST!</em></p><p>Instead, aware of decent people around me, I had time to compose something less objectionable, if no more clever: “You <em>suck</em>!”</p><p>Did the driver hear me, or care? Who knows, and probably not. I pumped away, powered by a righteous shot of dudgeon; he turned and went on about his business, oblivious. The real question is, When did I become the sort of person who yells “You suck!” in public? (Mere steps from the U.S. Capitol, no less.)</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nMnr8ZirI
">
<div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nMnr8ZirI"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FV3nMnr8ZirI%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DV3nMnr8ZirI&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FV3nMnr8ZirI%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div>
</div><p>Fans of these sorts of spectacles can indulge themselves on YouTube, where there’s a thriving genre of cyclist/driver interaction videos captured on helmet cams. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PFRdEUN240&amp;feature=player_embedded">Here’s</a> the best one ever.) Watching indignant bikers erupt in fury at the motorists who almost kill them is one of those queasily satisfying entertainments we never knew existed until online videos tapped this part of our id. But, as I’ve learned over several years of bicycle commuting across two cities most weekdays, bike rage is really best experienced live.</p><p>Many studies have pointed out various wellness boosts that come with “active commuting,” not just <a href="http://grist.org/cities/studies-show-that-bike-commuting-is-one-of-the-best-ways-to-stay-healthy/">boring cardiovascular stuff</a>, but stress reduction, improved focus, and various woo-woo benefits that may or may not be real. (According to this piece, “Bicycling <a href="http://grist.org/cities/studies-show-that-bike-commuting-is-one-of-the-best-ways-to-stay-healthy/">gently bounces the head</a>, increasing healthy circulation between the right and left hemispheres of the brain—back and forth—balancing and calming the mind.”) Add to that therapeutic regimen the primal release of screaming at the top of your lungs in public. Where else but on a bike can the soft and pampered modern urbanite go full caveman? <a href="https://psmag.com/the-psychology-and-biology-of-road-rage-1205bb15fc6c#.mfc8mn4qe">Automotive road rage doesn’t allow you to resolve your anger</a>; you just sit there, stewing in your cortisol and plotting acts of vengeance. The furious cyclist, however, gets to burn off all those stress hormones on the next hill.</p><p>Getting a daily fight-or-flight workout is one of those little-discussed advantages to bike commuting; the flip side is that you have to be willing to be afraid. And <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOb3DlB7WA">you will be</a>. Despite the strides made in the development of protected bike lanes, cyclists in most U.S. cities are tiny woodland critters amid large and dangerous predators. To ride is to live with constant, twitchy fear. Those who complain about the comparatively paltry numbers of bike commuters in the U.S. seem to have unreasonable expectations for the average Americans’ eagerness to be terrified.</p><p>Also: uncomfortable. On an optimal day—no rain, light breeze—the ride can be a joy; often, it’s the kind of frozen-bearded, soaked-to-the-underwear physical misery that most modern Americans manage to avoid. Eventually you will find yourself wrestling with a flat tire on a filthy sidewalk. Kids throw rocks at you. The wind shoves you backwards; patches of ice launch you sideways into trees. Upon arrival, you stink. <a href="http://www.bicycling.com/culture/beginners/why-youre-not-bike-commuting-and-how-fix">Bike-boosters insist</a> that the bother and safety concerns can all be mitigated with the right equipment, clothing, and state of mind, but I’m here to tell you that Gore-Tex and fancy pants will only get you so far. <em>Bike is suffering. </em></p><p>Famously, the Dutch and the Danes don’t have this issue; the denizens of <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23587916">European bike-topias</a> toodle about helmetless, young and old alike, in stylish outfits. They do not appear to sweat or suffer or swear at drivers. In Amsterdam, 70 percent of trips are by bicycle and the biggest nuisance is <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/the-dutch-love-cycling-so-much-that-their-bike-lanes-cant-cope/423492/?utm_source=feed">other cyclists</a>. Theirs is a different world, a two-wheels-good culture of massive public investment in cycle infrastructure. <a href="http://www.urbancyclinginstitute.com/blog/learning-by-doing-a-closer-look-at-the-exportation-of-dutch-cyc">Hundreds of international delegations visit Amsterdam annually</a> to learn the Dutch model and attempt to import it to their home cities. I wish them good luck.</p><p>This will be my seventh year of daily bike commuting, but the first winter that I sometimes greeted the gray and sleety early-morning ride and thought, <em>Nope</em>. My capacity for self-administered fear and discomfort may be fading; life, for some reason, <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/why-america-is-so-stressed-out-politics-politics-politics.html">seems stressful enough</a>. But the promise of yelling at my fellow citizens has not lost its therapeutic value. In a world that seems intent on drowning its inhabitants in mute outrage, it can be a relief to scream at someone—anyone—and ride righteously away. </p><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedRichard Clement/ReutersRide Angry2017-02-19T11:39:51-05:002017-02-19T14:29:07-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-517254The best thing about bicycle commuting is the rage.<p>In <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-metabolism-of-cities/">“The Metabolism of Cities,” </a>the celebrated sanitary engineer Abel Wolman describes urban areas as living organisms: They guzzle water, energy, and resources and then excrete sewage, garbage, and air pollution. By Wolman’s calculations, each dweller of a hypothetical city of 1 million would be directly or indirectly responsible for 120 gallons of sewage and four pounds of refuse every day.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Wastelands</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/wastelands/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/citylabwastelands.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/wastelands/?utm_source=feed">Wasted spaces, wasted buildings, wasted efforts</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/wastelands/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>This was in 1965, when the U.S. population was around 189 million. The <a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/02/you-made-me-and-im-coming-for-you/516075/?utm_source=feed">Great Lakes were already becoming fouled</a>; the first skein of automotive smog had descended over the skies of Los Angeles. Wolman, correctly, saw trouble ahead. ”As man has come to appreciate that the earth is a closed ecological system, casual methods that once seemed acceptable for the disposal of wastes no longer seemed acceptable,” he wrote. “He has the daily evidence of his eyes and nose to tell him that his planet cannot assimilate without limit the untreated wastes of his civilization.”</p><p>I think of this when I check my basement. Several times in recent years, my neighbors and I have found our cellar bathrooms bathed in sewage, thanks to chronic backups in a sewer pipe somewhere deep beneath the street. Baltimore has lately <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/investigations/bs-md-sewer-backups-20160514-story.html">been bedeviled by such backups</a>, the result of decades of deferred maintenance on the city’s less glamorous infrastructure, as well as complications stemming from the intertwining of sewer and stormwater lines (Here’s my colleague Laura Bliss’s <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2016/05/baltimore-basement-sewage-backup/484427/?utm_source=feed">CityLab report on the topic</a>; for a truly comprehensive accounting, my former colleague Baynard Woods goes <a href="http://www.citypaper.com/news/features/bcp-092816-sinkholes-feature-20160927-story.html">way, way deep into the sewers for the <em>Baltimore City Paper</em></a>.)</p><p>That all this is happening in Abel Wolman’s hometown—indeed, blocks from the university where he taught for several decades during a 75-year career—would probably vex <a href="http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-07-09/news/9907090309_1_abel-wolman-sanitary-engineer-public-health">the father of modern sanitary engineering</a>. Wolman devised of a reliable means of water chlorination that conquered typhoid and saved untold millions of lives worldwide. He also helped design and run Baltimore’s water system during the 1930s, when it was the envy of the East Coast, if not beyond. Baltimore lacked proper sewers at all until the early 20th century; after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 reduced much of the downtown to ashes, the city embarked on a some far-sighted Progressive-era efforts to update itself, widening streets, burying electrical wires, and beginning the process of building a comprehensive water treatment system—“the finest sanitary Sewerage system in the world,” boasted <em>The Baltimore Book</em>, a early 20<sup>th</sup> century municipal accounting of its post-fire progress. In those days, decent urban waste disposal was <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-manmade-marvel-of-the-baltimore-sewers">framed in heroic terms</a>—as well it should be.</p><p>For most of human history, the city has been a filthy place, and, boy, it doesn’t take much to get that way again. This week, CityLab will be visiting the urban wastelands, from the landfills of New York City to the open sewers of Phnom Penh. We’ll look at the things we leave behind—wasted food, wasted taxpayer dollars, wasted lives, wasted time. And we’ll show how wastelands of all kinds can be reborn. It won’t always be pretty, so dress appropriately. And pack light: We will leave no trace.</p><p><em>The series so far: </em></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/02/urban-renewal-wastelands/516378/?utm_source=feed">The Wastelands of Urban Renewal</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/02/you-made-me-and-im-coming-for-you/516075/?utm_source=feed">“You Made Me. And I'm Coming for You”</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/weather/2017/02/phnom-penhs-canal-of-unpleasant-fragrances/516015/?utm_source=feed">Phnom Penh's Canal of Unpleasant Fragrances</a></p><p><a href="http://%20http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2017/02/photographing-estate-sales/516687/?utm_source=feed">The Personal Lives of Forgotten Trinkets</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/design/2017/02/what-did-berlin-do-with-rubble-from-world-war-ii-teufelsberg/516609/?utm_source=feed">Berlin’s ‘Devil's Mountain': Built From Rubble, And Going to Waste</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/tech/2017/02/dark-tourism-peace-memorial-hiroshima-atomic-bomb/515829/?utm_source=feed">Hiroshima's Quest to Symbolize Peace, Not Destruction</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/design/2017/02/the-stadiums-that-ate-texas/516279/?utm_source=feed">The Stadiums That Ate Texas </a></p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2017/02/mining-heaps-of-garbage-for-data-about-food-waste/516852/?utm_source=feed">The Wisdom of Garbage</a></p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/weather/2017/02/garbage-patches-arctic-ocean-research/516924/?utm_source=feed">Humanity's Garbage Keeps Piling Up in the Arctic Ocean</a></p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/02/the-meaning-of-blight/516801/?utm_source=feed">The Meaning of Blight</a></p><p><a href="https://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2017/02/the-wild-comeback-of-new-yorks-legendary-landfill/516822/?utm_source=feed">The Wild Comeback Of New York's Legendary Landfill</a></p><p></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedAzad Lashkari/ReutersLeft Behind2017-02-13T12:22:51-05:002017-02-17T12:27:17-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-516465A week of stories about what we squander, discard, and fritter away: Welcome to the Wastelands.<p>Here’s Mary, pulling into town, alone: The towers of early-’70s Minneapolis loom in the windshield of her new white Mustang. She’s 30 and single in the big city. The song begins:</p><p><em>How will you make it on your own? </em></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="360" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F176329006&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F176329006&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F583541282_295x166.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=vimeo" width="480"></iframe></p><p>As it must have for millions of Gen Xers yesterday, a big woodgrain Magnavox in my head flicked on when I heard that Mary Tyler Moore was dead; immediately, I saw the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mary_Tyler_Moore_Show_opening_sequence#Theme_song">opening credits to her show</a>. Winner of 29 Emmys over its seven-year run that spanned 1970 to 1977, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was in heavy syndication during the 1980s, when I caught a daily afternoon dose of Mary Richards, Mr. Grant, and the rest of the WJN-TV crew.</p><p>As many appreciators have observed, Mary Richards was a pioneering character in television: Originally conceived as a divorcée (CBS balked), she was a single, working woman at a time when nearly every adult female on network TV was a mom, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Bee">matronly aunt</a>, or whatever <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9CR2JqzGlQ">these people on “Hee-Haw”</a> were supposed to be. After Mary, a deluge of career girls followed, from “Murphy Brown” in the ‘80s to “30 Rock” and the “Girls” girls (they have jobs, right?). They all, correctly, owe Moore an enormous debt of gratitude. </p><p>But MTM’s importance as a feminist cultural icon shouldn’t overshadow her other great achievement: Her role as a proto-yuppie laid the groundwork for the TV trope of <a href="http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2017/01/living-single-tv-show-gentrification/513302/?utm_source=feed">the city as a stage for childless young pals</a>. More broadly, her eponymous show—and the half-dozen equally influential programs produced by her production company, MTM Enterprises—helped define what American urban life on TV looked like in the 1970s and 1980s.</p><p>It all started with that opening credit sequence, a groovy collage of period filmmaking shtick, full of dramatic zooms, whip-pans, and freeze-frames. We see solitary Mary negotiating crowded streets, riding escalators and elevators, schlepping paper bags of groceries-for-one, gazing up at the skyscrapers of her new hometown. (As we learn in the pilot, she’s moved to Minneapolis after breaking up with her fiancé, Bill, the first of many feckless doofuses she must endure over the next seven seasons.) Shot on film and on location, that opening montage would change over the years (as did the theme song’s lyrics), but it retained its grainy, distinctively downtown funk: Mary, we understand, is <em>getting shit done in the city. </em></p><p>Like many a young urban striver, Mary quickly assembles her tribe, including sharp-tongued neighbor Rhoda, one of those young creatives who’s been priced out of New York. She marches into a TV newsroom to get a secretarial job and walks out with an associate producer title and bunch of mostly male coworkers. She moves up and out: The bachelorette pad atop an <a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/09/the-high-cost-of-living-in-a-sitcom-house/499304/?utm_source=feed">adorable Victorian</a> soon gives way to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Plaza">brutalist apartment tower</a>; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2017/01/25/fashion/a-lookback-at-the-mary-tyler-moore-look/s/24MTMs-FASHION-slide-BXPF.html">flirty minidresses become shiny silver pantsuits</a>. The decade marches on.</p><p>It wasn’t easy to celebrate city living in the ’70s, a time of spiraling crime, hollowing downtowns, and federal disinvestment; <a href="http://time.com/3949986/1977-blackout-new-york-history/">blackouts</a> and <a href="https://buffalonews.com/2017/01/22/blizzard-77-still-measuring-rod-massive-snowstorms/">blizzards</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/opinion/in-bleak-70s-salvo-of-protest.html">garbage strikes </a>seemed to gnaw at the very fabric of American society. But Mary didn’t flee to the suburbs. Her signature spunk was inextricably tied with her identity as a city dweller, someone who needed the energy and aggravation that a city provides.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>The shows that MTM produced shared that urban DNA: “<a href="http://www.avclub.com/review/bob-newhart-show-has-aged-gracefully-205259">The Bob Newhart Show</a>” aired right after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” substituting a droll Chicago couple in a sleek lakefront high-rise. Later came “WKRP in Cincinnati,” “Hill Street Blues,” and “St. Elsewhere,” which are, respectively, the best workplace comedy, best cop show, and best medical drama ever made. (Fight me!) And they were all, in their ways, built upon the cities they depicted—flailing, failing places that were somehow worth fighting for. In some impossible-to-quantify way, Mary Tyler Moore kept the spirit of urban America flickering during a dark time.</p><p>The message, for those of us watching these intrepid urbanites from our suburban family rooms, was clear: The city might be a screwed-up place, but it is still where the action is. Mary Richards, hitting 30 and sensing time running out, felt that when she loaded up her Mustang and left her small town. The city called. And later, when the crime abated and the yuppies gentrified, many of those<a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/09/downsides-of-the-back-to-the-city-movement/501476/?utm_source=feed"> cities bounced back</a>, refilling with young people who yearned for funky apartments and wacky coworkers of their own.</p><p>That story continues, despite all manner of new challenges. But, like the song says, we might just make it after all.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedMary Tyler Moore, Queen of the City2017-01-26T17:27:42-05:002017-01-27T00:20:38-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-514553Her show—and the shows her production company created—helped define what American cities looked like on TV in the 1970s.<p>Like the <a href="http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Machines">War Against the Machines</a> that spans the Terminator franchise, the <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/04/bikes-vs-cars-wages-the-wrong-war/389477/?utm_source=feed">War on Cars that urbanists are supposedly waging</a> is unavoidable, and essentially unresolvable. Battles are <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/12/vancouver-is-north-americas-car-free-capital/509480/?utm_source=feed">won</a> and <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/01/can-we-finally-declare-peace-war-cars/4472/?utm_source=feed">lost</a>, the hardware changes, but drivers and their pedestrianist foes are fated to forever be at each other’s throats, vying for control of the city streets. Perhaps because it’s a conflict that, like so many others, has become bitterly politicized, it’s hard not to despair of the final outcome.</p><p>I recently spent time in Venice, Italy, which was like entering some alternative timeline where this war never happened. Venice’s <em>Centro Storico </em>is Europe’s largest car-free space, a medieval city that somehow managed to make it into the 21st century nearly untouched by internal combustion. And, lemme tell you, it’s weird.</p><p>This is not exactly news, of course, but it was news to me. I was hilariously unprepared for this trip, one of those bucket-list events involving my family, my brother’s family, and my 87-year-old wheelchair-using mom. Despite months of planning, somehow it still snuck up on me, right up until the moment we showed up at the airport.</p><p>The guidebooks I skimmed on the flight failed to convey the alien quality of Venice, a place that aggressively defies time, geography, and the elements in a way that often left me weak with confusion and amazement. Once the seat of a vast maritime empire, modern historic Venice is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws 20 million tourists a year, but it’s also—just barely—a “real” city, not a theme park, with a dwindling core of permanent residents (perhaps 50,000 today, less than half its 1970s population). <a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/10/why-are-european-cities-so-dense/505541/?utm_source=feed">Like many European cities</a>, it’s dense and medieval and old and strange, made stranger by self-imposed aquatic isolation: The central city is really an agglomeration of built-up islands sitting in the middle of a salt-water lagoon. There’s a bridge to the mainland carrying rail lines, buses, and motorists who pay $22 a day to deposit their cars in an island-sized parking garage. After that, no more motors.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/01/DSC_0111/330982d11.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Need to get somewhere fast? Take a kayak. (John Dudley/CityLab)</figcaption></figure><p>Well, the boats have motors. But the land part of Venice functions largely without powered vehicles. Or, really, without wheels. The city’s 438 bridges, 183 canals, impossibly narrow streets, and countless steps make motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, wheelchairs, hoverboards, rollerblades, and just about anything else that rolls useless, if not illegal. So intense is the Venetian animus toward rolling things that the city <a href="http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-italy-venice-wheeled-luggage-ban-20141121-story.html">mulled banning rolling suitcases</a>, because the clatter of hard wheels on paving stones makes such a din in tourist-laden areas.</p><p>It’s hard to convey just how awesomely inconvenient this layout is, until you have to figure out how to push a wheelchair around it. Disability access is all but nonexistent; taking Mom out to dinner in a restaurant one neighborhood over required threading a labyrinth of narrow alleys in order to avoid a bridge that was only accessible by stairs. This delightful 18-minute video from the municipal government does a great job of explaining how Venice got this way, as well as delving into the nerdy inner workings of how a floating city stitched together from 124 islands manages to run utilities and deal with stuff like sewage.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="vimeo.com" data-oembed-src="https://vimeo.com/21688538
"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="720" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F21688538&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F21688538%250A%250A&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F139700819_1280.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=vimeo" width="1280"></iframe></div><p>Other curiosities: Municipal garbage collection is done by hand—which means you have to do it all the time—6 days a week. The trash truck is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQP_xpcf380">a dude pushing a little cart</a>, which eventually <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo5Vnies9Rc">goes to garbage barge</a>. (Luckily, if you have to lug your groceries home by hand every day, you’re probably not generating the same amount of refuse.) Other barges deliver the goods that a city of 20 million tourists needs to consume, from cases of prosecco for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/dining/06spritz.html?mtrref=cooking.nytimes.com&amp;gwh=7F79B5F9FB26B19AF9786C7B97825C96&amp;gwt=pay">Venetian Spritz cocktails</a> to Chinese-made plastic gondolas.</p><p>All the stuff, good and bad, that one takes for granted in American cities—from car infrastructure like parking lots and beltways to shiny downtown office towers and parks—is just not there. <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/394">As UNESCO says</a>, “the whole urban system has maintained the same layout, settlement patterns and organization of open spaces from medieval times and the Renaissance.”</p><p>It takes a while for the reality of that idea to settle in. Other old cities in Europe and beyond share some of these characteristics, and <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2017/01/madrid-will-ban-cars-from-its-main-street/512246/?utm_source=feed">many have large (and growing) car-free zones</a>. Venice, however, operates on a scale that makes its carlessness and pre-modern vibe feel immersive: There are no highways in the distance to break the spell, no blocks of ‘70s office towers or apartment buildings nibbling on the edge of the quaint historic core. After a few days wandering around this space, it’s easy to forget such stuff still exists. </p><p>And the silence! The ever-present roar of traffic—the Great American Background Noise—is nonexistent, and the city is so hushed that even streets thronged with pedestrians are basically peaceful. Turn a corner after dark, when most tourists have left, and the alleys of Venice could be haunted by the same <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-dont-look-now-1974">wintry forces that stalked Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in the 1973 horror flick <em>Don’t Look Now</em>.</a> When our troupe took a wrong turn after a Christmas dinner at an off-the-beaten-track<i> osteria</i>, we might as well have been lost in the forest primeval.</p><p>This de-mechanization of public space has all manner of impacts upon how people live, some less obvious than others. Venice lacks the sort of throbby nightlife scene of other great European cities, in part because, well, it’s just too damn quiet—the <em>whump whump whump </em>of a dance club here would be heard for miles around. On the other hand, Venetians seem to enjoy a more relaxed attitude toward day-drinking. All afternoon, the piazzas and alleys seem to be filled with neighbors enjoying cocktails passed though the windows of tiny corner bars called <em>bàcari</em>. Nobody has to drive home. The intimacy of the street life can be overpowering; turning a corner and happening upon a knot of gabbing Venetians feels like barging into their living room.</p><p>The expectation of having to walk everywhere also re-calibrates one’s sense of space and time. The historic city is a tiny thing, only 3 miles long—you could walk from stem to stern in 45 minutes, probably, if you knew where you were going. But it’s so densely built and anarchically organized that one could spend a happy lifetime learning all its blind alleys and dead ends.</p><p>In other words, it’s a city where the scale of existence is still aligned with human bodies instead of machines (even human-powered ones). This vibe may not seem radical, except it makes one realize how rarely American cities achieve it, even in places made as respites from the urban tumult. Venice boasts little in the way of official green space, for example, save for a patch of garden on the eastern edge of the city that came <a href="http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/a-brief-history-of-i-giardini-or-a-brief-history-of-the-venice-biennale-seen-from-the-giardini/">courtesy of Napoleon, </a>who ended 1,100 years of independence for the Venetian Republic when he invaded in 1797. He then went all Robert Moses on the place, demolishing older neighborhoods and filling in a canal to make a park and a wide Parisian-style boulevard.</p><figure><img alt="" height="415" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/01/DSC_0070/ca3456662.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Via Garibaldi, on the city’s east side, is its widest street, a canal that was filled in during the early 19<sup>th</sup> century. </figcaption></figure><p>This newer part of the city offers a novel strolling break from the steady diet of narrow passages, but the city’s brush with Napoleonic urban renewal didn’t really change things much; unlike the <a href="http://www.westland.net/venicehistory/articles/canalfill.htm">canals of California’s Venice</a>, most of which became regular streets once private cars became popular in the 1920s, the original Venice didn’t really have to fend off the efforts of highway builders and other civic visionaries of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. It just works, the way it always did.</p><p>For now, at least. The Venice that endures now is a stupendously fragile place, menaced by rising sea levels <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/16/inside-venice-bid-hold-back-tide-sea-level-rise">and natural subsidence</a>. The city struggles to control <em><a href="http://iamnotmakingthisup.net/4130/motondoso-suck-it-up/">motondoso</a>—</em>damaging wave motion churned up by motorboats, which erodes the foundations of buildings and swamps the delicate wetlands. Its big defense against the future superfloods of our warmed world is <a href="http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/09/venices-vast-new-flood-barrier-is-almost-here/498935/?utm_source=feed">the MOSE project</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project">a crazy-expensive and untested system of sea walls that is still under construction</a> (and probably won’t work anyway). Last year, UNESCO <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/opinion/can-we-save-venice-before-its-too-late.html?_r=0">threatened to put Venice</a> on its <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/danger/">World Heritage in Danger</a> list unless the city’s leaders showed signs of getting a handle on things. The impact of climate change is just one of the all-too-real regular-city problems often overlooked amid the tourist-related threats. Venice is also dogged by <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-death-of-venice-corrupt-officials-mass-tourism-and-soaring-property-prices-have-stifled-life-in-10251434.html">an affordable housing crisis</a>, <a href="http://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2014/06/04/news/mose_35_arresti_per_tangenti_anche_il_sindaco_di_venezia-88004605/?ref=HREA-1">a recent mayoral corruption scandal</a>, and all manner of workaday economic woes. In some ways, it’s not such an unusual place at all.</p><p>And maybe this strange medieval tourist trap offers a useful vantage to ponder the challenges of more modern cities; in its ingenuity in the face of ridiculous circumstances, it’s an urban community that has demonstrated an enviable capacity for resilience. If the Venetians manage to keep this impossible place afloat, perhaps the rest of us are on firmer ground than we think.</p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedJohn Dudley/CityLabNo parking: Cars are banned from Venice's historic center; after a few days, you might forget they even exist. The Uncanny Power of a City Without Cars2017-01-17T10:56:59-05:002017-01-17T13:03:14-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-513278Europe’s largest pedestrian-only urban space is also one of its most fragile. But Venice may hold lessons for other cities struggling to adapt to a changing world.<p>Walls—real walls—are overrated. They crumble and leak and fall over; they get <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/great-wall-china-donald-trump">breached</a> or ignored or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line">avoided</a>. They’re expensive to build and hard to maintain. Go look up the famous ones. They all come down, eventually.</p><p>But the imaginary ones, like the <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/2016-09-01/donald-trump-promises-impenetrable-and-beautiful-mexico-wall/">beautiful and impenetrable wall</a> that so captivated and divided the American electorate in 2016, represent something more powerful—a line that can define who we are, and show us where something else begins.</p><p>These boundary zones can be magnetic places. Who doesn’t want to see if there’s something better, right over there?</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Borders</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/borders/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2016/10/Mariposa_07/lead_large.jpg?1476222558"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/borders/?utm_source=feed">Stories about places on the edge</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/borders/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>That was certainly true in my border town, Buffalo, New York, where a weekend jaunt across the Niagara River to beautiful Fort Erie, Canada, was a fixture of adolescence. In those pre-9/11 days, the crossing between the two nations was a casual one. During the 1970s gas crises, we’d run the to the border for cheaper unleaded, or just for lunch (Fort Erie boasted a strip of <a href="http://eatingniagara.com/2016/10/fort-eries-chinese-restaurants/">mysteriously superlative Chinese food</a>). As high schoolers during the mid-1980s, we made international beer runs, taking advantage of our northern neighbor’s more permissive alcohol laws and nightlife culture (locally known as “the <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Canadian%20Ballet">Canadian Ballet</a>”). We found life on the other side of the <a href="http://www.peacebridge.com/">Peace Bridge</a> familiar yet faintly exotic—Canadians had different accents, drove weirdo alternative-universe cars like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac_Parisienne">Pontiac Parisienne</a>, and used the metric system. In their mildly foreign ways, I first learned what it felt to be American.</p><p>That, in part, is what borders do—offer a safe space from which to survey the wider world beyond. But lately an anxious strain of nationalism has emerged in North America and Europe, where state boundaries are being re-fortified against tides of refugees, and the rhetoric of wall-builders dominates. The borderless world promised by globalization has hit, well, a wall.</p><p>Throughout this week, CityLab will be venturing into this disputed territory. We’ll be talking about barriers, bulkheads, and boundaries of all kinds, and asking what draws so many of us to places on the edge. We’ll ponder the mysteries of the “border vacuums” that suck the life out of cities, see what kinds of fences are good fences, and fantasize about re-drawing the lines around cities, states, and nations of our own invention. We’ll also meet the people who are making art that crosses borders, and those still seeking common ground in a world that seems determined to remain divided.</p><h3>Read more in the series:</h3><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/design/2017/01/the-complete-guide-to-border-vacuums/512381/?utm_source=feed">The Complete Guide to 'Border Vacuums'</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/01/the-high-cost-of-closed-borders/510197/?utm_source=feed">The High Cost of Closed Borders</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/01/how-gerrymandering-is-containing-city-power/512621/?utm_source=feed">Where Gerrymandering is Containing City Power</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/01/the-urban-laboratory-on-the-san-diego-tijuana-border-teddy-cruz-fonna-forman/512222/?utm_source=feed">'Unwalling' the U.S.-Mexico Border</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/01/the-case-for-restoring-el-pasos-transnational-streetcar/512672/?utm_source=feed">The Legend of El Paso’s Transnational Streetcar</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/01/when-invisible-borders-trump-the-real-ones/512210/?utm_source=feed">When Invisible Borders Trump the Real Ones</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/01/how-does-one-undam/512663/?utm_source=feed">Visions of the Alabama Dam Dividing My America</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2017/01/guatemala-border-home-design/512897/?utm_source=feed">The Guatemalan Towns Plastered with American Icons</a></p><p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/01/in-divided-denver-a-highway-promises-reconnection/512660/?utm_source=feed">In Divided Denver, a Highway Promises Reconnection</a></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedJose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersA section of the soon-to-be-improved U.S.-Mexico border wallDrawing the Lines2017-01-09T11:31:53-05:002017-01-12T13:32:35-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-512510A week of stories about borders, real and imagined.<p>The best scene from the 1946 Frank Capra flick <em>It’s a Wonderful Life</em> isn’t the final one, the famous part where everybody sings “Auld Lang Syne” in George Bailey’s living room. It’s the one before it, that long tracking shot that follows George as he bounds exuberantly through the long main street of Bedford Falls, the idyllic little town he’d once vowed to flee.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBa2Mm-nP50
"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FeBa2Mm-nP50%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeBa2Mm-nP50&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FeBa2Mm-nP50%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=8164a61223cb4585ad276041728caca9&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="640"></iframe></div><p>In case you have somehow avoided this glorious holiday hambone of seasonal redemption, go find a TV and watch it right now. But here’s the précis: George Bailey, in the person of Jimmy Stewart at his most likable, reluctantly abandons his youthful dreams of adventure and escape and shoulders the burden of shepherding his father’s building-and-loan business through the Depression and World War II. Marriage, family, and middle age arrive. One Christmas Eve, villainous banker Mr. Potter connives to entrap his younger rival in a financial disaster; binge drinking, impaired driving, and suicidal ideation follow. Then dopey guardian angel Clarence intercedes to offer George a glimpse at what the world would have been like if he’d never been born.</p><p>On release, the movie was received with modest box office and mixed reviews. (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E00EFDE163DEE3BBC4B51DFB467838D659EDE"><em>New York Times</em> critic Bosley Crowther</a> found it “a little too sticky.”) It owes at least some of its reputation to the timing of its rediscovery: In 1974, the film’s copyright protection lapsed, and local TV stations pounced on the royalty-free holiday fodder. When mid-1970s viewers rediscovered Bedford Falls and its denizens, a holiday classic was born.</p><p>Like many a myth, <em>Wonderful Life</em> lives on by rewarding multiple interpretations. In the greed-is-good 1980s, the film functioned as a rebuke to rapacious Reagan-era capitalism; earlier Me Decade audiences might have related better to the tragedy of George’s thwarted ambitions. In today’s Divided America, there’s something here for everyone. Conservatives can enjoy the small-town values and vigorously interventionist deity, while progressives cheer George’s lending policy toward low-income immigrant residents. But for those Americans living in places that look less and less like Bedford Falls, it’s hard not to see the movie as something else entirely—a fable of American anxieties about urbanism and community.</p><p>Before romping down Main Street, George has a noirish brush with “Pottersville,” the sin city of disreputable-looking jitterbug emporia and live burlesque shows that would have come to pass without his steadying presence. Restored to his proper reality, George delights in seeing Bedford Falls’ familiar landmarks rendered decent again: There’s the one-screen Bijou movie house, there’s the Bailey Building &amp; Loan at which George squandered his youthful dreams. “Merry Christmas!” George shrieks, a man back in love with his crummy little hometown, and all it represents.</p><p>Capra spared no expense creating Bedford Falls for the film. At the time, the four-acre, three-block-long set he built in Encino, California, was one of the biggest ever built. Full-grown oak trees were planted along the street, to give the place a properly rooted sense of authenticity. The special-effects people concocted a realistic-looking detergent-based chemical snow to simulate wintertime in upstate New York, which is where the fictional town was supposed to be located. Bedford Falls is, in many ways, the enduring star of the film, which is why its trippy transformation to tacky Pottersville drives George to pray for the return of his boring old life, and the small town that defined it.</p><p>This makes sense: He is, after all, a developer, and <em>Wonderful Life</em> is a paean not only to the small-town virtues of family and community but to actual small towns, or at least their design principles. With its compact, walkable downtown and abundance of well-kept porchfront homes, Bedford Falls is a showcase of enlightened mixed-use planning, the kind of city Jane Jacobs would have asked Santa for. When ‘70s audiences rediscovered the film from the sunken living rooms of their subdivision ranchers, they must have seen a lost American paradise, a vanished world of robust community bonds and neighbors who looked out for each other. And George’s conversion narrative is rooted in what we’re now calling the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-rodriguez/political-nostalgia_b_11199804.html">politics of nostalgia</a>—he turns his back on the future, choosing instead to cower in the cozy confines of the past. </p><p>There are some rich ironies in this. George is—or was—a frustrated architect; he dreams of designing bold new cities and building “skyscrapers a hundred stories high.” Instead, he settles for creating Bailey Park, a low-income housing development of cookie-cutter homes carved from the outlying woods. In other words, sprawl-happy George may get few people out of Potter’s slums, but he also unwittingly helped plant the seeds of the town’s demise. Even in 1945, Bedford Falls is apparently shedding manufacturing jobs—George mentions that half the town is out of work since the old tool-and-die factory closed. If Bedford Falls’ demographic patterns followed the norm for small metros in the industrial Northeast, in all likelihood, downtown’s bustling sidewalks and thriving shopfronts would soon empty, barring further angelic meddling.</p><p>Several modern critics have addressed these issues. Gary Kamiya, in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2001/12/22/pottersville/">a timeless <em>Salon</em> takedown from 2001</a>, argued that Pottersville is more George’s kind of place anyway—at least, the adventure-minded young George. With its hoppin’ nightspots and permissive live-music ordinances, it’s infinitely more interesting than suffocating Bedford Falls, where nosy neighbors lurk on every porch. Wendell Jamieson, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html">in the <em>New York Times</em></a>, sounded a similar theme in 2008, calling the film “a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people.” He called an urban policy professor at NYU to confirm that the town (in its Bizarro guise as casino-friendly Pottersville) would probably be in better shape economically had George never existed, thanks to the gambling revenue. An even odder twist is discussed by the political scientist <a href="http://politicalscience.nd.edu/faculty/faculty-list/patrick-deneen/">Patrick Deneen</a> in <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/12/its-a-destructive-life">his 2012 essay</a>: During George’s alternate-reality sojourn, we learn that suburban Bailey Park was literally built on top of the town cemetery, just like in <em>Poltergeist</em>.</p><p>For a heartwarming holiday favorite, <em>Wonderful Life </em>is full of these horrors. Bedford Falls is haunted, like the best Christmas stories, by the spirits of what used to be and what is yet to come. It’s easier to see that in 2016 compared to 1946, since we know more about what will happen to this town than the hero does. George won’t be able to make Bedford Falls great again. “In the real world, <em>Potter won</em>,” as Kamiya wrote. “We all live in Pottersville now.”</p><p>The village of <a href="http://therealbedfordfalls.com/">Seneca Falls, New York</a>, is said to be the model for Bedford Falls. If you go there today, you can see the ghosts of Capra’s Encino simulacrum: There’s the steel truss bridge from which George threatens to jump; there are the grand Second Empire homes, dead ringers for the Bailey clan’s drafty rehab. But any number of nearby upstate settlements, from Elmira to Waterloo, could stand in just as well. This is the forgotten country of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/books/richard-russo-happily-at-home-in-winesburg-east.html">Richard Russo novels</a>, the hollowed-out manufacturing burgs now visited by reporters asking residents what they heard in the voice of the man they helped make president. The Bijou has been dark for a long time.</p><p>Peter Bailey, George’s saintly dad, seems to see all this coming, even as he battles to keep the Potters of the world at bay. On the evening before he succumbs to his fatal stroke, the elder Bailey makes a half-hearted attempt to keep his older son in Bedford Falls instead of letting him go to college. But George isn’t buying it. “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office,” he complains. “I just feel like if I don’t get away, I’d bust.”</p><p>The thing is, George is right—and indeed, he will bust. Even his dad has to agree. “You get yourself an education,” he finally says, echoing the advice of generations of parents who hope to pass a more wonderful life on to their kids. “Then get out of here.”</p><p><em>An earlier version of this essay appeared in the December 2009 issue of </em>Urbanite<em> magazine. </em></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedAPGeorge Bailey, low-income housing developerLast Exit to Pottersville2016-12-22T08:00:00-05:002017-01-30T21:22:30-05:00tag:citylab.com,2016:209-511367What the 1946 Christmas movie ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’<em> </em>says about small-town America in 2016.<p>After a sluggish couple of decades, this was the year Baltimore suddenly got into the bicycle infrastructure game. The city’s <a href="https://www.bmorebikeshare.com/">first bike-share system</a>, which was years in the making, opened recently, along with a small but <a href="https://www.bikemore.net/downtown-bike-network">meaningful network of protected lanes</a>, including <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/11/why-protected-bike-lanes-save-lives/508436/?utm_source=feed">a pair of cycle tracks that are protected from traffic</a>. These may not be the sort of deluxe bike highways that would make a Portlander or Montrealer envious, but their arrival represents a major leap forward for a city <a href="https://placesjournal.org/article/the-third-rail/">that’s struggled, historically, to put the pieces together, mobility-wise.</a></p><p>In typically Baltimorean fashion, the road forward has not been entirely smooth. When my local neighborhood association debated the installation of a protected cycle track, <a href="https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2015/11/07/in-roland-park-a-civil-war-over-a-cycle-track/">residents packed public meetings to hurl profanities at the city, and each other, over the issue.</a> And the rollout of the bike-share system had drawn criticism of a different sort. Ellen Worthing, a Baltimore blogger and open-data advocate, made <a href="http://chamspage.blogspot.com/2016/12/baltimore-city-biased-and-racist-bike.html">a series of revealing maps </a>that overlaid bike rack locations, bike share stations, and bike lanes with the city’s racial demographics; Lawrence Brown, a community health professor and activist at Morgan State University, observed on Twitter that, like so many transportation amenities, bicycle infrastructure appeared to be concentrated in the city’s more affluent—and whiter—districts, a band of waterfront that extends northward <a href="http://www.citypaper.com/bcpnews-two-baltimores-the-white-l-vs-the-black-butterfly-20160628-htmlstory.html">in a strip known locally as “the White L.”</a></p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">My fellow Baltimoreans, our biking infrastructure is among the most racist &amp; apartheid system in our city. It's appalling. No excuse! <a href="https://t.co/nPkA7oTgKV">pic.twitter.com/nPkA7oTgKV</a></p>
— Action.Brotha.Jedi (@BmoreDoc) <a href="https://twitter.com/BmoreDoc/status/791671145506406400">October 27, 2016</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Baltimore’s struggle to address racial and economic inequity issues in transportation, appease skeptical motorists, and turn the corner on better bicycling infrastructure mirrors similar debates taking place in other cities, from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/nyregion/citi-bike-may-need-public-funding-to-reach-more-new-yorkers.html?smid=tw-nytmetro&amp;smtyp=cur">New York City</a> to <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/10/londons-media-is-seriously-hating-on-cycle-lanes/503300/?utm_source=feed">London</a>. The culture of bicycle advocacy itself is often seen as a movement that can unwittingly accelerate the displacement of low-income communities—and confronting that perception has become a key challenge for bike advocates nationwide. Liz Cornish, who leads the bike-boosting nonprofit <a href="https://www.bikemore.net/">Bikemore</a>, has been getting a crash course in this phenomenon.</p><p>As Women Bike Manager for the League of American Bicyclists in Washington, D.C., Cornish had been working to help encourage more women riders; previously, she had been involved in educational nonprofits and worked for Outward Bound in Omaha, Nebraska. “People were very curious about why I moved to Baltimore,” she says. “They asked me, ‘What’s it like there?’ I think they were expecting me to say it’s hard to bike here when you have to dodge violent crime all the time. But the single hardest thing to deal with in Baltimore is this belief that comes from decades of mistrust and mistreatment and disinvestment that says, ‘Nothing good can happen here.’”</p><p>Cornish talked to CityLab about the culture-changing power of bike lanes, and how to—and how <em>not</em> to—convince citizens and lawmakers to build them. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.</p><p><strong>You’re a relative newcomer to Baltimore; how did you end up fighting for bike infrastructure in a city that’s never had much of a reputation as being bicycle friendly</strong>?</p><p>What has always motivated me was making cities healthy and safe places for kids to grow up. I used to think school reform was the way to do that. But what I found was that the fastest way to get people engaged was to improve neighborhoods—figuring out ways to make it nice for people to walk and bike places, and then making it easy for business owners to create places for people to walk and bike to.</p><p>When I worked for Outward Bound in Omaha, I got involved in an organization called the <a href="http://www.omahabydesign.org/projects/urban-design-element/neighborhood-omaha/benson-ames-alliance/">Benson Ames Alliance.</a> That was the first time I learned about things like urbanism and designing streets for biking and walking. The transformation I witnessed in Benson was something I’d never seen before. You had this streetcar suburb that had been annexed many decades before, and the streetcar had gone away and you were left with this Main Street that, design-wise, was great—lots of mixed-use development, with stores on the bottom and apartments on the top. But the storefronts were empty. Over the course of three years, they all filled up. There was this shine on a neighborhood that had been forgotten. And then suddenly people started to care deeply about the quality of the education that was happening in that neighborhood high school.</p><p><strong>It seems like there's a growing understanding, even in places that are not thought of as particularly progressive on bikes, that they can encourage all kinds of positive changes</strong>.</p><p>Think about <a href="http://indyculturaltrail.org/">Indianapolis and their cultural trail</a>—not just the economic development that's been spurred by that trail, but the shift in that town’s culture. Cities are a great place to work in if you are a natural problem solver, because they’ve got lots of problems. Biking is a tool with which you can address all these different problems. So if you want to talk about public health inequities, let's talk about how to design neighborhoods where there are safe places to get exercise, because we know that cardiac disease is one of the leading drivers of public health inequities.</p><p>In these discussions about bike equity, people are often thinking only in terms of the physical infrastructure—where the bike lanes or bike-share stations are located. That's important. But biking also lends itself to having a macro discussion about equity. We've designed our cities in such a way that it can produce terrible air quality. In Baltimore City, the number-one reason why kids miss school is asthma-related illness. And we know that reducing a single car trip can improve air quality. We don't think about that as an equity issue. But I do. In some ways, getting anyone out of their car and reducing traffic congestion is a win for that particular equity issue. Biking is a very cheap solution to that very complex health problem.</p><p><strong>Let’s talk about those costs a bit. The cycle track that just opened is part of a $3 million bike infrastructure build-out. In Baltimore—as in many cities—plenty of taxpayers object to those costs, which they see as only benefiting a relative handful of recreational riders. </strong></p><p>Well, in Baltimore’s <a href="http://transportation.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/Southest%20Strategic%20Transportation%20Vision%20Final%20August%202016.pdf">Southeast Transportation plan</a>, one of the projects being recommended in the current draft of the plan is $50 million to widen a quarter-mile stretch of Boston Street. We know that widening streets only induces demand, so while it may relieve congestion for a few years, five years later we are right back where we started. $50 million is also the cost of <a href="https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/407660">Portland’s entire investment in bike infrastructure</a>, and it’s also the price tag for <a href="http://en.velib.paris.fr/">Paris’ bike-share system</a>, which is one of the largest in the world. $50 million dollars is also what it would cost to repair every single sidewalk in Baltimore City. If you went to taxpayers and said, “Would you rather have that quarter-mile stretch of street widened, or would you rather see every sidewalk in the city repaired,” I think we know what most people would say. And yet most of our decision makers don't see it that way. They are prioritizing car travel over literally everything else.</p><p><strong>You can’t talk about investing in neighborhoods in Baltimore without talking about inequality and race. How do you address the cultural issues in bike advocacy on this?</strong></p><p>We know that some of Baltimore's challenges are the direct result of the decades of disinvestment in our black neighborhoods—the <em>strategic</em> disinvestment in black neighborhoods. So we have to figure out how to correct for that. I just came back from a conference called <a href="http://www.untokening.org/">The Untokening</a>, which was a gathering of biking advocates from around the country that were interested in creating a learning space to center racial justice in their work on mobility. Having been to plenty of biking and walking things over the last few years, you get used to seeing all the same people. When I got into this room, I knew the organizers, but I didn’t know everybody else. They did a really great job of bringing people that normally may not have that access.</p><p>There are countless examples of cities that are challenged in this area. Memphis is now launching their bike-share system, and the intention with which they are doing community engagement before they launch is really impressive. The city was completely open to the idea of doing the outreach and then hearing, “We don’t want bike share.” The goal of advocacy shouldn’t be to get tunnel vision and just champion your cause. The goal should be about helping to lift up everyone you can with your work. I’m only a good advocate if there are people in every neighborhood that are also championing a similar ideal or vision. </p><p>That’s why moving to Baltimore has been such a humbling experience. No matter what my background is, there’s no winning in terms of changing the way people think about transportation if this is a conversation that’s only centered around a tall blonde white lady from the Midwest. There’s no winning in making that happen. So I’ve had to think creatively in terms of engaging as many people around this conversation as possible.</p><p><strong>So how do you go into say, <a href="https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/13/lessons-from-west-baltimores-ill-fated-bike-lane/">West Baltimore, where there has been real resistance to bike lanes in the past</a>, and have that conversation?</strong></p><p>You can’t lead with bikes. That’s not the point. The point is safety. The point is health. So I have to be able to sit and listen to neighbors who’ve lived in that neighborhood for longer than I’ve been in Baltimore, and rely on their experience and knowledge of the area, about what works and what doesn’t, and what has been tried and what’s failed. We try to remind people that we know that commute time is one of the most significant indicators of someone's ability to move out of poverty. And we know that some of Baltimore's most vulnerable neighborhoods have some of the longest commute times. They are <em>in the city</em> but they can't get to jobs or amenities like healthcare and schools and groceries without being on the bus for an hour.</p><p>So, what are you asking? Are you saying, “I’m gonna put a bike-share location here—is that a problem?” That’s a terrible way. When I ask people what do they want their neighborhood to feel like, there isn’t a single neighborhood in this city, or a single person I’ve talked to, that hasn’t said things like, well, I wish the cars drove slower. And I wish there was a safe place for my kid to learn to ride a bike and play. And I wish there was something for me to walk to, like a restaurant or a coffee shop or a dry cleaners. These are universal quality-of-life things that every neighborhood desires. After I hear that, that’s an opportunity for me to say, actually, there are solutions to some of these things. And one of many solutions is building a bike lane. It calms traffic. It makes the crossing distance shorter. It provides connectivity to things inside and outside your neighborhood. That’s how you have the conversation. And it hasn’t failed me yet.</p><p><strong>There’s been criticism here about what parts of the city are now receiving bike-related investments, and you see similar questions raised about Citi Bike in New York City, which is </strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/nyregion/citi-bike-may-need-public-funding-to-reach-more-new-yorkers.html?smid=tw-nytmetro&amp;smtyp=cur"><strong>under some pressure from activists to expand into lower-income parts of the city</strong></a><strong>. </strong></p><p>That impatience when it relates to equity is 100 percent valid, and I share it. I think I’m still learning how to address that. The critique has been levied: Why isn’t this happening in other neighborhoods? There’s a really long answer that deals with funding, and the city’s over-reliance on community organizations to help guide master planning. What if your community doesn’t have someone with an urban planning degree on their board to get things done? How do you champion these things if you say you’re only going to come there if you ask for it? That’s one reason we focus on high-level policy change, because this stuff should be standard. Bike lanes should be standard operating procedure, not something you have to fight for.</p><p>But I don’t think we were going to be able to shift our thinking until we had something tangible that said, “It works here,” so that people could see the sky doesn’t fall when you take away a lane of traffic. Without having something in the ground, it’s really hard to make the kind of sweeping change people are asking for.</p><p>I do feel like that’s the reason Bikemore has been able to be modestly successful. I believe it can happen, and it deserves to happen. And it doesn’t matter how many people say it can’t or it won’t. I’ve lived in enough places that are just like this. I’ve seen it happen. The ball is already rolling down the hill. I’m just hanging on, and trying to point it in the right direction.</p><p><em><strong>UPDATE: </strong>This post has been updated with additional information. </em></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feedBikemoreThe new Maryland Avenue cycle track in Baltimore, part of the city's emerging network of protected lanes.Enlisting Bikes In the Fight Against Inequality2016-12-19T12:41:05-05:002016-12-20T15:30:48-05:00tag:citylab.com,2016:209-511088Liz Cornish of the bicycle advocacy group Bikemore talks about how bike infrastructure can help solve a host of woes in Baltimore.<p>A few weeks back, I found myself in downtown Cincinnati, keeping my eyes peeled for a glimpse of the <a href="https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/streetcar/">Bell Connector</a>, the Queen City’s new streetcar line. When it opened in September, ridership was strong, especially on weekends. Boosters of the project, who had to overcome fierce resistance from conservative state lawmakers (and the city’s new mayor) to get the rails in the street, were sounding pretty pleased. <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/09/the-streetcar-cant-save-your-city/501014/?utm_source=feed">As I wrote in October, new streetcar lines in Cincinnati and Kansas City</a> opened with healthy ridership numbers, warming the hearts of trolley fans in places like Detroit and Oklahoma City, where similar next-generation streetcar projects are in motion.</p><p>So on the blustery Saturday after Thanksgiving, fortified with a rum-spiked cup of <a href="http://www.chowhound.com/recipes/german-mulled-wine-gluhwein-30925">glühwein</a> from the delightful <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cincideutschmarkt/">German Holiday Market in Fountain Square</a>, I planted myself at a sleek and glassy streetcar stop on Walnut Street and waited. And waited.</p><p>Where was the damn streetcar? After more waiting, wandering, and wine, I finally found a car, sitting motionless a block or so up. There was a healthy crowd of Cincinnatians milling about the festive square, loading up on <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/06/17/everything-need-buy-eat-goetta/28876147/">goetta sandwiches</a> and checking out <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/786968/ad-classics-rosenthal-center-for-contemporary-art-zaha-hadid-architects-usa">the volumetric massing of Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center</a> nearby, but the Bell Connector seemed uninterested in getting in on the action.</p><p>A <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2016/12/06/streetcar-ridership-numbers-way-short-projections/95043064/">recent report</a> in the <em>Cincinnati Enquirer</em> confirms that all is not precisely well in streetcar-land: After a strong September and October, the numbers dropped off a cliff. “The Cincinnati Bell Connector's ridership is plummeting, with barely half the projected ridership last month,” the paper said. That holiday weekend Saturday turned out to be the second-best day of the month. On average, daily November ridership was 1,664, far below the expected 3,200.</p><p>In Kansas City, ridership dipped with the arrival of colder weather too, but the drop is considerably less worrisome: That city’s new streetcar line is chugging along with <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/kc-streetcar/article118271923.html">more than 6,000 riders per day in November</a>, and a feasibility study on the merits of building an extension has just been announced.</p><p>What’s gone off the rails in Cinci? The <em>Enquirer</em> fingers faulty ticket machines as one factor. But there’s a bigger, more complex problem: The electric streetcar, that late-19th-century conveyance, has re-imposed itself on some late-20th century traffic planning. Cincinnati’s downtown traffic flows are now maximized to swiftly shunt cars on streets running east and west, getting commuters to and from the pair of interstates girding the city. But the Bell Connector runs north to south, which means it can be frequently mired in traffic. The <em>Enquirer </em>writes:</p><blockquote>
<p>Streetcar timing is off and that means nobody knows when it will arrive at a station. On weekends, that's no problem. On weekdays, when people need to get to appointments, work or even lunch, timing has been a deal-breaker.</p>
</blockquote><p>I checked in with Derek Bauman, a Cincinnati streetcar project supporter, to see what he made of the ridership slump. “There’s no question the rollout was not what it should have been,” he told me. “There were a number of things that were avoidable, and a few that weren’t.” (Among the latter: A pair of <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2016/09/10/streetcar-shut-down-police-matter/90202636/">Saturday night bomb threats</a> that briefly halted service.) The balky ticket machines are working better now, he says, but real-time arrival information is still problematic, as are the traffic-light chokepoints: “Even at 8 at night, the streetcar is getting hung up at every light.”</p><p>Recalibrating the light timing should help, as would giving the streetcars dedicated lanes, but streetcar advocates agree that there’s a need for a new traffic study, which would cost $300,000. The planning blog <a href="http://%20http://www.urbancincy.com/2016/12/downtown-signal-study-stuck-in-political-traffic/"><em>Urban Cincy</em> observes that the last study was done in the mid-1990s</a>, when the downtown area had more workers and fewer residents.</p><p>An <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/12/09/5-steps-ensure-streetcar-success/95144068/">op-ed in the <em>Enquirer</em></a> outlined another, far more expensive remedy: Build more streetcar! The original project included an uptown line to connect with the University of Cincinnati. That got eliminated during the long and bruising political battle over the idea, but backers still hope to pursue a future extension. Unless they can iron out a few more kinks—and convince a few more people to get on board—that may be a hard, uphill slog.</p><p>Bauman, for his part, is confident that warmer weather will herald an uptick in the streetcar’s fortunes. “The system’s not going anywhere,” he says. “We’re going to push for these fixes and suffer through the cold dark days of winter. Come spring, when the Reds start playing, I think it’ll be busy.”</p><p><em><strong>UPDATE: </strong>This post has been updated with additional information. </em></p>David Dudleyhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/david-dudley/?utm_source=feed@cincistreetcarPlease ride me. Cincinnati Has a Streetcar Problem2016-12-09T15:31:00-05:002016-12-12T14:37:13-05:00tag:citylab.com,2016:209-510143After a strong start, the city’s new system is experiencing some growing pains.